


Assorted Team Fortress 2 WIPs

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slow Burn, Unrequited Love, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-03-10 13:59:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 60,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3292973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various Team Fortress 2 WIPs! There are pieces of some longer things here, mixed in with shorter ones, as well. I will probably move some of these out of this when I finish them. Please be advised, they are very fragmented and all-over-the-place. Still, I hope you enjoy reading!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How To Distract Your Depressed Demoman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immediately after the WAR, the RED team tries to cheer Tavish up after what they all (correctly) assume was a spectacular and awful breakup. This is set in the same everyone-is-sleeping-with-each-other 'verse as Already Fallen In Love, but comes earlier.

"I know what you're thinkin'," the scout said, smirking. "Pretty nice, huh?"  
The Demoman mirrored the younger man's smirk, his eyes traveling down Scout's body. 

He wasn't bad to look at. Tavish had expected gangly limbs and a pigeon chest, but the scout was a runner: he had high, tight pecs, the muscle close to the bone, and what he lacked in arm muscles he made up in abs, lithe muscles rippling under the surface of barely-tanned skin. The muscles of his thighs were enough to make a grown man weep--rises of long muscle stretched taut from the way he was half-sitting, half-crouching. His calves, though slender, looked like they were sculpted from marble.

“Wanna touch? I won’t bite ya or nothin’,” he said, cheerfully. Then, a moment later, he frowned a little. “Unless...you’re inta that. I’m pretty sure Sniper and Spy are, but I don’t like to play that rough, so, uh. Sorry, man, but nah.”  
“I don’t want ye to bite me, lad,” the Demoman said. “And I don’t particularly care to bite you, either.”  
“Well, then--Whaddaya wanna do?” he asked, sitting back on his heels.

When Tavish didn’t say anything, he shifted closer, crawling to sit beside him.  
"Hey, c'mon, man. It's gonna be fun! I mean, we already know I'm great, so we're already halfway to a great time, yeah?" He nudged the Demoman's shoulder, and Tavish smiled in spite of himself.

“Okay, okay, tellya what. Since I’m SUCH a good guy, I’ll give ya head. Then, uh...hmm...I could fuck you, an’ let your old, old back have a break an’ stuff so you’re not, like, dead on your feet tomorrow. Y’know. ‘Cause my, uh, well, Spy likes sayin’ shit like ‘bedmates’, an’ Engie says ‘partners’, but I kinda usually just say ‘fuckbuddy’, ‘cause it sounds less dorky--ANYWAY, mine are always worn out the next day.” The Scout paused, made an almost panicked face, and then amended, “I mean, in a good way! I ain’t one’a those guys who, like, cheese-grates dicks with my teeth and fucks like a dyin’ seal floppin’ around on a rock!”

The Demoman snorted a laugh. The Scout grinned, his crooked teeth only compounding the effect of him being a rather dumb kid trying to sound like a sex god.  
“So, ah,” the Scout said, nudging him a little. “Sound like a plan?”  
“Sounds like YOUR plan,” the Demoman said mildly.

The Scout elbowed him a little, gently. “Do you not wanna do it? ‘Cause I can just, go, yanno, stuff someone else’s cock into my totally sexy, totally-super-available mouth.”  
He elbowed the Demoman some more, until Tavish finally smirked and gave him a light shove back.  
“Ach, well then. Come here and give us a kiss...”

“You, Spy, Sniper, Medic, n’ Heavy all have the same kinda dick,” the Scout murmured.

His palms were velvety-soft from always being covered by the bandages, and the callused, rough undersides of his fingers giving interesting counterpoints of texture.  
“What d’you mean, lad?”

“This,” the Scout said, and bunched up his foreskin a little.  
He snickered softly into the side of the Demoman’s face when he shuddered and groaned in pleasure.  
“You mean me foreskin, lad?”  
“Yeah, if that’s what it’s called. What’s it feel like?”

Then it was Tavish’s turn to laugh--low, a little, wondering why such a question was so amusing. Maybe the blunt, innocent way the Scout had asked.  
“I don’t rightly know how to say,” he said, honestly. “You mean YOU don’t know?”  
“Nope. Ain’t had one for as long as I can remember.” He was staring at the older man’s cock, his his lips glistening faintly where he’d just licked them,

The Demoman knew what he was about to ask for, but Tavish had a shutter-quick memory of someone else between his legs, Jane’s crooked smile and stubble rasping slightly, pleasantly against his thighs--

He pulled him in for another kiss, instead, the younger man laughing into his mouth when he used his position to sling him over his lap.

~

The Scout slipped from the bed and pulled the blanket back around Tavish's shoulders. He must have figured the Demoman was asleep, because he stood up and stretched again, his back making a series of little pops.  
"Hope you feel better, buddy," he murmured.

Tavish didn’t move or make a sound; the Scout sighed softly, sounding so, so old.  
He must have paused in the doorway before he spoke again. “Hope he’s worth it...”  
Tavish waited until after he slipped out of the room to exhale, the sigh feeling like it dragged up air that had been sitting in his lungs for years.

~

The Scout walked back out into the rec room, rolling his shoulders, grinning.  
“Yeah, so, we fucked. It was pretty great. Pretty sure he said I gave the best head he’d ever had. I’m such a giver, y’know?” he said.  
The Heavy glanced at him and then looked at the Engineer, who snorted softly.

The Engineer was sitting at a table with a schematic for what looked like a ridiculously complicated vibrating cocksleeve in front of him. The Heavy was standing across from him, and drank the last of a mug of coffee before setting it down on the tabletop and leaning back against the wall, his hands in his pockets.

When neither of them said anything, the Scout curled his hands into fists, his shoulders rising up near his ears as he tensed up, faking like he was insulted.  
“What! You tryn’a say I DON’T give good head? You know I’m the best--” the Scout yelped.

“Spy,” the Engineer said eloquently, “Currently holds that honor. You’re not bad, but you could use some lessons on the finer points of technique.”  
“Like WHAT?”

“Like not running your mouth about it afterwards,” the Spy said, from behind him.  
He was over jumping every time the snooty Frenchman did that; he just turned, snorting, his hands on his hips.  
“Oh, yeah? ‘Zat so?”  
“Oui.”

The Scout stepped up closer to the Spy, until they were almost nose-to-nose. The Scout was still scowling; the Spy looked unimpressed.  
“Oh, YEAH?” he asked again, lower.  
Echoing his tone, the Spy murmured, “Oui. Lapin.”  
The Scout’s scowl deepened.

When the Scout was close enough that he could smell the older man’s aftershave and sweat, the scowl turned into a wicked smirk.  
Before the Spy could react, he leaned forward and licked the man’s upper lip, then darted back out of his reach, laughing. The Spy made a noise that was part-groan, part-squawk, part-growl. He reached for him, but the Scout was already dodging away, behind the Heavy. 

“Spy...” the Heavy said, holding out his arms in a placating gesture, and the Spy’s grasping hands fell on the sides of the big Russian’s vest, fingertips sliding into the armholes.

“Heavy,” the Spy said, his voice velvety, “Sil vous plait, move, so that I may discipline the little biting bunny.”

The Russian shrugged, smirking a little. “Is not so bad. A bit of saliva is what you are angry about? Have gotten worse on your face; I know how Sniper plays.”

“Oui,” the Spy said, shrugging a little, “But he is decent and always asks my permission beforehand.” He paused, gave the Heavy a loaded up-and-down look, and then crooked one eyebrow. “Now. Will you move for me? Or do I have to give you some...incentive?”

He wriggled the fingers on his right hand; the Heavy jerked to the side, a bark of startled laughter coming out of him.  
“SPY!” he said.  
The Spy just held on, stepping deftly to the side along with the big Russian.  
“Oui, Monsieur Heavy? You wish to reconsider your ill-concieved idea of protecting the boy?”  
“Hey! Quit talkin’ about me like I’m just some kid! I’m right freakin’ here! I--”  
“Silence, garcon, while the adults are talking,” the Spy said, without breaking eye contact with the Heavy.

The big Russian was biting his lips, his arms clamped against his sides, but that meant the Spy’s fingers were trapped just beneath his armpits.  
The Frenchman gave him an absolutely syrupy grin. “Are you sure?”

When the Heavy opened his mouth to respond, what came out instead was a shout of laughter, and then he jerked to the side again, trying to pull away from the Spy.  
The Scout saw an opening and made a break for it, guffawing.  
Unfortunately for the Spy, the Heavy had no ideas of letting him go.

“That was unkind trick, Spy,” he murmured into the Spy’s ear. “I told you that secret with strictest confidence, and this is how you repay me?”  
The look of blank shock on the Spy’s face was hilarious, though only marginally more so than the noises he started making when the Heavy grabbed him in a bear-hug and tossed him over his shoulder.

The Spy’s yells went from French to English to Russian to Spanish to Italian and back to English again, alternating pleas with threats.  
The Engineer looked after them mildly. “Bring him back in one piece now, hear?” he called.

The Heavy paused from the doorway, the Spy thrown over his shoulders like a boar carcass, thin wrists clamped in one of his hands and ankles gripped in the other.  
He shrugged, grinning. “Da, will make effort. But I can make no promises.”

~

The Spy returned almost thirty minutes later, tie missing, jacket unbuttoned, pants creased in wrong places, and shirt untucked and rumpled. His balaclava was on crooked, as well, showing a swath of skin to the left of his eyes that was a paler olive tone, obviously not tanned.  
“I cannot believe you allowed that brute to manhandle me,” he muttered. 

The Engineer only smirked. “You know, I’d believe your complaint was sincere if you didn’t smell like lube and were conspicuously NOT covered in his blood.”  
“Ah, merde. Am I so obvious?” he asked. 

He slipped a cigarette out of his disguise kit, but when he lit it, the smoke came up skunky-sweet and thick.  
The Engineer raised an eyebrow.  
“Oh, hush. I only do it when I am in a very good mood.” the Spy explained.

~

“I will not patronize you,” the Spy said, quietly.  
The implication struck both of them with a kind of hard irony--here was the only man on the team who might, at least visually, give him the illusion of being with the BLU Soldier, pointing out how rude it would be to do so.

Instead, he reached into his suit and pulled out a small yellow envelope.  
“I can give you something better. If you would like.”  
The Demoman stared long and hard at that envelope. Finally he reached out, willing his hand not to shake.  
“Let me see them. Let me see HIM.”

There were a dozen photos--nothing from the battlefield, either, all shots from in and around the BLU base, Jane doing simple things without a single inkling that he’d been followed, that he’d been watched. 

There was one of him sitting on a bench, apparently just outside the showers, his side to the camera, toweling off. One of his arms was lifted slightly, the other stretched to rub the towel into his armpit. His head was bent down slightly, the side of his face to the camera. In the background, the BLU Sniper was pulling on a white undershirt.  
The picture was so mundane--so strangely, perfectly intimate, that Tavish caught his breath. Tears came to his eye.  
“Does...does he know?” Tavish whispered.

“That you still pine for him? I do not know,” the Spy said. “But of course he was not aware that I was following him. A spy as careless as that would be a dead spy.”


	2. Teufort Saturday Night Knitting and Needlwork Club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a short all-team thing that originated out of multiple (some borrowed) headcanons of all the mercs having hobbies and getting together to do them together. I love fluff so much. ;___; I hope you like it!

"Thirty...twenty-nine..." the Scout was staring up at one of the wall-mounted cameras and muttering to himself. He was sitting at the absolute edge of the couch’s cushion, his hands on his knees and his fingers ticking rapidly back and forth. 

He could jus thear Engie’s voice in his mind. ‘Boy,’ he’d say, ‘I swear, you're gonna hurt yourself, starin' with your face worked up like that.’

He didn’t care. He’d also asked Medic if it really WAS possible for your face to get stuck--to settle the matter once and for all, of COURSE it made sense to ask a mad doctor, he thought. And since the Medic’s answer had been an eye-roll and a ‘No’, he was making all the faces he wanted. 

The Scout kept counting down, actually bouncing in place as he did.  
"Two..." the Scout said, his entire body tensed like a compressed spring.  
The little red light on the camera blinked a final time, and then went out.  
The Scout lunged off the couch and covered the room in two massive bounds, throwing open the common room's door.

A second later the RED Spy materialized in the hallway, a parcel under one arm.  
"Took ya long enough, spook," Scout said, but he was grinning. He stepped aside to let the Spy through.

"Good evening, lapin. Where is my unfashionable blue-suit wearing doppelganger?"  
"--one more word about my suit, and I will liberally decorate it with your blood," the BLU Spy appeared, much less flashily, by walking in from the kitchen.  
They looked at each other with thinly-veiled distaste--but the RED Spy's facade cracked first. His lips twitched.

Then they were hugging, slapping each other on the back and talking--French and Italian and Spanish swimming together into an intractable tangle of words, their own indecipherable language.

(Engineer had a theory that they actually _had_ invented their own language, and used it to speak in code that no one else understood. This same theory held as to why they hugged every time they saw each other--he was almost certain they were slipping notes into one another's pockets, or checking for weapons that weren't supposed to be there.)

Tavish, the RED Demoman, strolled in a little while later. Well, strolled wasn't exactly the word. He was _trying_ for casual, but the way he paused in the thresholds of all the rooms and very carefully looked around at who was inside said he was really nervous.  
In a moment, the Engineer was greeting him; they talked for a bit, and then went into the kitchen.  
The Scout smacked his lips. Tonight was gonna be _GREAT_!

~

It was a few more moments before everyone was there.  
The Sniper had come ambling in moments before and plopped down in one of the more rickety wooden chairs, the one whose back left leg they'd replaced with a sawed-off two-by-four. There was a ball of thin charcoal-gray yarn in his lap. He was putting the finishing touches on a sock; the RED Spy stalked over, humming, pleased.  
"Ahh, you are too good! Per'aps if your aim was as good as your needlework..."

The Sniper snorted laughter and elbowed the RED Spy in the side, before binding off the final stitch. He snipped the yarn, shook the sock out, and then took its mate out of the dented tin tackle-box he kept all his knitting supplies in.  
"Yeah, well. If I hit your teammates as often as I had the chance, they'd've replaced the lot of you ages ago."

"Maybe so, maybe so." The Spy said. He settled down in the guest chair--called so because it was the only wood-frame chair they had that didn't teeter, had both arms, and a functioning seat cushion. He slipped off his shoes. 

The socks he had on were visibly thin at the heel; he made a polite moue before slipping off his worn socks and sliding on the ones Sniper had made.

He leaned back and practically melted into the chair, sighing rapturously. "You have done it again, Sniper..."  
"Ah...thanks, mate. Glad y’like ‘em.” He adjusted his aviators, shifted minutely in the chair, and spent a few awkward moments trying not to stare at the Spy as he wriggled his toes in the new socks, smiling down at them vaguely.  
“Eh...so, about that payment..."  
"Oui, oui--can you not let a man rest a moment?" he lay back in the chair and heaved another contented sigh.

After a moment, though, he straightened and picked up the parcel he'd set on the table. When he unwrapped the length of twine holding it closed, he flipped it carefully, unfolding the paper to reveal a blue shirt--one of the uniform shirts. He turned it inside-out and looked at the seam of where the patch had been coming off the sleeve, and where the sleeve itself had been torn away from the body of the shirt. The damage had been repaired with tiny, perfect stitches.

The Spy handed the shirt to the Sniper, spreading the cloth between his hands for the other man to inspect.  
The Sniper slipped off his aviators to get a better look, humming thoughtfully. He took the shirt from him, fingering the repaired areas.  
"Dunno how you do that so perfectly, but I'm glad you do," the Sniper said. He nodded at the Spy, smiling. "That'll do, mate."

The RED Spy sniffed. "Of course it will. I would not let a single stitch of imperfect needlework leave my hands. Per'aps if you were better at not getting shot...or not snagging your sleeves..."

"Oi, that last one was your Soldier's fault! A bloke can't be duckin' and dodgin' 'round on a narrow, rickety gangplank, with bits of jagged metal where a handrail ought to be, and NOT snag something! Nearly took a rocket to me face, tryin' to avoid him."  
"Ah, pardon. He has been taking lessons from our Sniper."  
The Sniper actually smiled, then, and rubbed his nose. "That so? He's a wanker, then."

~

They were the first to get settled; moments later, the BLU Medic came in, carrying an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag, out of which he pulled a leather tool-roll, the kind field surgeons used to carry their implements in. It was presently full of knitting supplies and only contained the incidental scalpel and pair of tweezers; while he fussed around trying to find his favorite stitch markers--all made from shaved-down spent minigun bullet casings--the RED Engineer came in. 

His guitar was slung over his shoulder by a fancy, elaborately-worked leather strap, and he was walking very carefully, one hand cupping the tool-pouch he wore at his waist.  
“Didja bring ‘im?” the Sniper asked suddenly, sitting upright in his seat. 

The Spy tsked softly and rolled his eyes--which was for show--and finished tying his other shoe. (He was wondering how large of a favor it would take for the Sniper to darn his last pair of socks. They were Pima cotton and alpaca wool--hardly the sorts of things one threw out simply because they were slightly worn.)

“Yup, I did,” the Engineer said, grinning at the Sniper. “Had ta take a nice slow stroll around the base a minute before he nodded off proper, but I brought ‘im.”  
“Aww, little fella,” the Sniper said.

The Engineer’s rusty chuckle. “’Little fella’, nothin’! He’s gonna be one of those cats who don’t care a whit for anything but spoilin’ things to keep your attention. But so help me, I ain’t got the heart to stay mad at ‘im. Still, he’s a holy terror. Y’oughta see the mess he made in the kitchen last Friday! Our Demoman about skinned him for a sporran!”  
The Sniper snorted a little laugh. “He get ‘is claws into a chicken or somesuch?”  
“No sir. Paper towels,” the Engineer said, still smiling. “Looked like someone set off an explosion of unfortunately beige confetti, if you follow me.”

He sat down in another of the chairs, turning the arrangement into a half-circle: Sniper at the farthest end, Engineer beside him, a crate-turned card table between them; then the RED Spy, who rose and went to sort of hover behind one of the other chairs, next to the BLU Medic’s armchair. (He would be hanged by his thumbs before admitting that, while excellent with a needle and thread, he had been completely defeated by knitting, and was therefore incredibly jealous of anyone who knew that particular craft. And while the Sniper was adept at knitting socks, the Medic would crank out beautiful argyle-patterned vests, Aran sweaters, and excellent striped scarves, with a kind of frank ease that made even the Sniper scowl enviously.) 

Meanwhile, the Scout had gotten out a really battered tin that had once contained shortbread cookies, and which he now used to house his small stash of sewing supplies--needles, thread, a handful of mismatched pins, and a little stub of beeswax, gone grubby with use. He was sitting sideways and cross-legged on the slouchy couch, his back wedged comfortably between the backrest and the armrest and his knees sticking out like a resting colt’s.  
"Well, garcon?"  
The RED Spy had pulled up the Guest Chair and settled in it, beside the Scout and the couch.

"I tore my jacket, see?" the Scout said, and held up the garment in question, which, indeed, had a good-sized flap of cloth hanging down from one of the sides. It was a high school letterman jacket--gray double knit body with yellow arms and matched gray-and-yellow-striped cuffs. 

"I was tryin'a squeeze through between some boxes, an' I got caught on a nail...anyway, I kinda like this jacket." He looked back up at the Spy hopefully, then, when the Spy didn't respond immediately, he sighed and wadded it up in his hands.  
"It's trash, ain't it? I might as well throw it out, huh?"  
"I did not say that! Let me see, now," the Spy said. 

He held it out at arm's length, frowned a moment, then turned it inside-out.  
The Scout watched him the whole time, nervously, until finally the Spy, still fingering the torn seam, said, "It is reparable. It seems that most of the damage was just the pocket tearing off from the body; there is no damage to the fabric."

The Scout let out a happy whoop that the Spy smiled and rolled his eyes at.  
"ALL RIGHT! Okay, great, so what do I gotta do?"  
And he spend the next half hour at the RED Spy's elbow, chewing his lips while working on sewing the damaged areas, with the Spy occasionally prodding the back of his hand or making a disapproving noise. Once--mercifully _ONLY_ once, this time--the older man made him rip out and redo an entire line of stitching. 

("Aww, come on, man!"  
"Do you want it fixed, or do you want it--how would you so prosaically say--fucked?"  
"Ugh...fixed..."  
"That is what I thought. Now do it over again! And this time, pay attention to your seam allowance!")

When he finished, he crowed, and held it out.  
"Boom! Hot co-chorr!"  
When everyone in the room gave him a blank look, he pinkened slightly and said, "You know--like from France and all that shit!"

The RED Spy looked over his work, amused, and then said, "Garcon, that is haute couture the same way a hot dog is an artesan-crafted sausage." He paused a moment, looking over the seam, and then made a satisfied noise.

"But it is serviceable, nonetheless. Much improved from your first efforts."  
"Yeah, yeah. It's not like Home Ec was a class guys like me could take. You know what they'd _DO_ to me, the guys, if they saw me now?"

"Cower in terror at the odor of your unwashed socks?" the Medic asked. He did not look up from the ridiculously fancy sweater-vest he was working on. It was dark blue and had a pattern of yellow and gray argyle diamonds on it, and it was very conspicuously too large for him. 

The Scout started to complain, when the RED Spy shrugged lightly and said, "Really, Scout, if you are afraid of the opinions of small-minded street rats at this point, there is no help for you. Do you not shoot people for a living? Have you not been shot? And have you not shot others--not on accident with a little pop-pellet gun or whatever other repulsive little toys American parents are giving their children--but with a real firearm, with the intent to maim or kill? Your job involves charging at men twice your size--who are armed to the teeth and trying to kill you--and harrying them with a constant stream of bullets and crude remarks. What is the worst thing some...what is the word...some greaser from your hometown could do to you, really?"

The Scout closed his mouth. A thoughtful expression spread over his face; he nodded, and then smiled at the Spy.  
"Hey, yeah! That's true, huh?" he stuck out his chest. "Ain't none'a them guys done anything half as hard as this! Well, 'cept Benny, but he works at the Pound wrestlin' mad dogs all day, an' I wouldn't trade places with him for _nothin'_. Y'know? Huh. I never woulda thought of it that way. That's..." he wrinkled his nose, and then said, slowly, "Interesting."

The RED Spy looked at him, one eyebrow quirked in amusement. "Oui. It is. Try to remember that."  
The Medic glanced at the Scout and something like amusement--or fondness--stole across his features; he shared a conspiratorial look with the Spy that literally went over the Scout’s head. The younger man was turning the jacket inside out with greatly exaggerated care, gently prodding at the repaired seam with careful fingertips.

After a moment he laid it over the couch’s armrest, stood up, and then decided to go see what the RED Demoman was up to in the kitchen.

~

In the kitchen, the RED Demoman hummed to himself and sifted several powders together. The bowl was large, the kitchen was hot, there were metal pans laid out everywhere, and he was happy as a clam.

"Frosting?" the Scout said, materializing out of nowhere. He had a finger stuck in the bowl to swipe a gob of it before the Demoman could even turn around.  
"I do hope you hands were clean?" he asked, and the Scout shrugged.

The Demoman huffed and snatched a spoon out of a drawer, scooping out all the frosting surrounding where the Scout had stuck his finger.

"Here! Eat this, and keep yer hands out of it. I'll not have the Spies comin' for _my_ head if they find little bits of dirt or bandage-lint in the icing on _their_ slices of cake." He gave the Scout a Meaningful Look as he handed him the spoon; the Scout looked back at him, solemnly, until Tavish cocked his head and blinked in a way that told the Scout he was winking--that he was forgiven.  
“Hey, thanks, man,” he said.

The Demoman waved him off, smiling, turning back to the bowl he was mixing.  
The Scout sat down in the least-rickety kitchen table chair and licked the spoon slowly, savoring it like it was a lollipop. 

He watched the older man crack three eggs into a bowl, skimming the yolks away and dumping them into a little mug; after a moment he paused, began pulling drawers.  
“Where the bloody hell did yer Spy move the whisk to?” he asked.

The Scout shrugged. “I dunno, man, he usually chases me outta here before he starts cookin’.” the Scout scratched his arm. “Or I’m still asleep, ‘cause he’s makin’ breakfast.”  
“Damn et,” the Demoman muttered, and then strode to the door, pushing it open.  
“SPY!” he hollered.  
The RED Spy’s voice, surly and annoyed, “Yes? What is it?”  
“Not _YOU_. Where’s the BLU one?”

“He went out a while ago,” the Medic said. “He did not say where he was going.”  
“Ach, perfect. Now I’ll be spendin’ the next hour tearin’ this kitchen up to find the damn thing.”  
Luckily, it was only five minutes and twelve pulled and rummaged drawers later when he found the whisk--tangled in the tines of a salad-serving-fork the Scout had never even seen before.

The Scout scooted closer for a better view as the Demoman set to whisking the egg whites, humming under his breath as he did.  
“What are you tryin’ to do with ‘em?” he asked. “Ain’t you supposed to just dump ‘em into the bowl with the rest’a the stuff?” 

“Of course not, lad! The cake would be dense as a hearth-brick. No, no--” he said, pausing to take a breath for a moment. “If you beat the whites ‘til they’re stiff an’ creamy as icing, the cake will rise like a cloud, and taste airy as an angel fart.”  
This startled a laugh out of the Scout; he leaned closer and stared down into the bowl Tavish was beating the egg whites in. 

The whites _were_ starting to look thick--almost as creamy as whipped cream. The white was a stark, attractive contrast to the dark, gleaming burnished copper of the big mixing bowl--one of Spy’s nice ones, the Scout knew. All their other cooking stuff--the stuff that was there when they’d arrived--was old, dented and bent stainless steel, and just the bare minimum to run a kitchen. 

(The only reason he knew this was because the Spy had pointed it out, annoyed and surly, one day when he was trying to make bread. There hadn’t been a bowl big enough to hold the dough). The Scout figured the Builder’s League higher-ups had expected them to just eat rations, and the cellars were full of crates of awful canned crap that nobody who wasn’t desperate (or the Soldier) would touch. So, the kitchen was barely furnished at all. 

When the Spy had started cooking, a mysterious new array of even fancier kitchen gizmos had shown up--bright copper mixing bowls and pans, big enameled cast-iron pots (which the Scout wasn’t even allowed to touch), earthenware casserole dishes glazed molasses-brown on the inside and eggshell-white on the outside, little long-handled pots barely big enough to fit his fist into. The Scout was used to opening cans and dumping soup or beans or whatever into pots, plonking the pot on the stove, and prodding the stuff occasionally, until steam rose out of it. He had no idea how the guys--the Spy and the RED Demoman--managed to just make food from scratch.  
“What’s that taste like?” he asked.

Tavish snorted a chuckle. “Like beaten egg-whites. Hand me that sugar--no, the powdered sugar there--that’s a lad.” And he showered some in quickly, swirling the eggs gently in between additions. When the sugar was used up, he set the bowl aside and leaned over the counter, and flicked a towel off another of their mixing bowls--this one a big blue ceramic one, and scooted it closer. In it there was something more familiar--a rich, dark brown cake batter, redolent with the smell of chocolate and spices.  
“See, but how come you even need to add eggs to that? Why’n’cha just put that in a pan?” the Scout asked, pointing at the batter.  
“Like I said. Do you want a chocolate-spice-flavored brick, or do you want a cake?” Tavish asked.

The Scout snorted. “Okay, okay. I don’t know nothin’ about cookin’,” he shrugged.  
Tavish beat the egg yolks into the batter, and had just begun scooping the beaten egg-whites--now snow-white and glossy--into the bowl of batter when the RED Spy pushed the door open.

“Scout, would you come in and help us with something? The Sniper has...had an accident with his yarn, and needs your assistance to untangle it.”  
Just around him, the Scout could see the Sniper sitting in the same place, a ball of yarn clutched loosely in one hand, and more yarn--in big snarled loops and tangles--trailing down his legs and all over the rug. A small black-and-white tuxedo kitten was rolling around in it, batting at the loose strands.

The Sniper was mostly sitting there and smiling down at him, just like everyone else in the room, while he destroyed the yarn.  
The Scout sighed and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, okay, I’m comin’.”  
He started to turn around to say something to Tavish.

There was a general commotion from the room--awww’ing and laughter--and when he turned around, he saw that the cat had completely wrapped himself in yarn and was mewling and trying to wriggle out of it backwards. 

“I gotta go now, or I’ll be stuck out there de-catting yarn ‘til tomorrow,” the Scout mumbled.  
Tavish’s laugh followed him out into the living room.

~

The BLU Engineer was sitting at his work-table and doodling a bridge, sliding his ruler across the paper, sketching a line here, another there. He had already covered three pages with similar sketches, mathematically-precise, lightly sketched in graphite and pale-blue transfer-pencil. 

The BLU Soldier sat across from him, his head buried in his arms and a half-dozen empty beer bottles at his right elbow. He was fast asleep and snoring.  
The Engineer glanced up when he took a particlarly deep breath, the snore rattling into his lungs--before releasing it. He shifted slightly on his chair.  
The Engineer shook his head a little, ruefully, and twisted in his chair to look over his shoulder, back out at the base proper. 

~

“Is this what you did with my suit? This is what you did with my suit!” the RED Spy said, half-incredulous. 

He was holding one of the Engineer’s little rag-dolls, the ones he’d carry around with him like good-luck charms. The trunk the Engineer kept them all in stood open, just beside the Spy’s knee, yellow-and-brown flannel lining--and its contents--open to the world.  
The Engineer felt a wave of hot embarrassmant rake over him.  
“Ah--! Er--! Spy, how did you--”

“My Sniper tells me that he saw you take the jacket from my corpse, once,” the Spy said, shrugging fluidly. “I was curious about what you did with it. Although...I must say, I rather resent you making it into an imitation-voodoo doll.”

The Engineer couldn’t meet his face. He coughed softly. “Yeah, well. Helps me keep from wantin’ ta strangle ya after ya get through shortin’ out all my buildings.”  
“Should I be flattered that you carry a small piece of me wherever you go?” the Spy continued, smiling. “Or concerned, that you take out your anger on it?”  
“That ain’t the only reason I have it,” the Engineer said, weakly. “I mean...revenge, that is.”  
The Spy smirked a little. “Certainly,” he said.

He bent back over the little wooden chest, tucking the Spy doll back inside, and lifting out a teddy bear instead. The bear had a chubby little body and was dressed like the Engineer--tiny coveralls, goggles, hardhat and all.

“And...him? Whose uniform did you steal pieces of to make him, mm?” the Spy said, dandling Teddy Roosebelt in one hand. His arms and legs wobbled comically in Spy’s grip.

“Ah, hell, it ain’t your business,” the Engineer said. “And wouldja jest give him back?”  
The Spy cupped the bear in one hand, frowning thoughtfully down at him.  
“So heavy! What did you stuff him with?”  
“...Cedar and pine sawdust. Now, wouldja--”

But the Spy lifted the little bear, one leg in either hand (much to the Engineer’s scandalized shock) and gave his pudgy bottom an investigatory sniff.

“Alors, so he is!” he said, and flicked a laughing gaze back at the Engineer.  
“His skin feels like...you must have had a chamois cloth you did not need...and his little coveralls, made of...knit jersey, the same sort they use to make t-shirts. And what did you do for his goggles?”  
“I, ah, this an’ that...” the Engineer said.

“I see. Nylon grosgrain ribbon, the same sort used for backpack straps...spare washers for lens frames--hmm, these look like the kinds used to prevent screws from denting metal canisters--small pieces of red plastic for lenses, very clever. And...a toy hardhat. You have even cut holes for his ears,” the Spy said.

The Engineer stood wringing his hands slightly as the taller Frenchman listed all the things the little bear was made out of. 

“Pobre osito...he has been feeding you sawdust and stuffing you into a belt, when you should have eaten cotton candy and lived on a nice safe shelf somewhere...” the Spy said.  
“Aww, now Spy--” 

“Shh, hush, he is saying something back to me,” the Spy said. He held the bear up to the side of his head and pretended to listen very hard, his eyes trained on the ceiling.  
After a long moment, he wrinkled his nose, recoiling from the bear. “You are the one to tell him when to hit _me_? With that awful spiked wrench? I see I have been mistaken. Labourer, take your vicious beast and keep him far away from me.” He handed the bear back to the Engineer with an expression of feigned disgust.  
The Engineer laughed, surprised.

There was a break in the Soldier’s snoring, enough that they both turned to look, the Engineer worried.  
The other man only settled lower on the table, though, groaning in his sleep before resuming his snoring.  
“Pardon me for teasing you, Ingenieur. I find it...charming, that you carry a memento of all your teammates around with you.” 

“It’s jest a little toy,” the Engineer said, holding one of Teddy Roosebelt’s little paws between forefinger and thumb. “I, ah, make little things to keep my hands occupied, when I don’t have anything else to work on. Bit difficult, carryin’ around heavy machinery all the time.”

The Spy nodded. He had gone back to staring at the little Spy doll, smiling fondly.  
“These are quite good, actually.”  
“Yeah, well, you get used ta thinkin’ in three dimensions, and you wanta continue,” the Engineer said. “Drafting patterns is a nice way to unwind after a long day of starin’ at blueprints, I think.”

The Spy shrugged and settled himself comfortably aghainst the edge of the worktable.  
“Oui. We all need ways to relax.”

~

"So, I been thinkin'," the Scout said.  
"Remember to stop if yer head starts achin'," Tavish said mildly, and the Scout wadded up a paper napkin and beaned him in the shoulder with it.  
The older man only laughed and kicked the offending paper projectile towards the trash-can.  
"I'm only funnin' with ya, boy. What's on yer mind?"

"I...I know you an' your friend had a big argument..." the Scout began. He was talking slow, trying to be careful, trying to have--the word was 'tact', the Spy, or the Medic, or even the Engineer, would have reminded him. What that meant was, he was trying not to be an ass. Or, at least, not as big of an ass as he usually was.  
He bit his lip.  
"Oh? And...which friend would that be?" The Demoman went back to slathering frosting on the cake, his face carefully blank.

The Scout sighed. "Don't get mad, okay? I got somethin' to say, an' I think it's a pretty good idea, an' you're real nice and I think you deserve better than...Y'know." he made a pained face and picked at his bandages, scratched his arm where a loose thread from his sleeve was tickling him.  
"I know what?" Tavish said, and looked at him full-on. 

It ocurred to the Scout that he had no idea how old the Demoman was. But with that sad look on his face, he looked young, and vulnerable (another six-dollar word he'd picked up from the Engineer) and HURT.

The Scout ducked his head and steamrolled ahead. "With...with, y'know, Solly. I, um. Don't get mad, okay? Just. Seriously, don't, before you hear me out."  
He paused again.

The Demoman's hands were still, one hand on the bowl, the other holding the little rubber spatula-thing with a curlicue of chocolate frosting on it as perfect as a spitcurl.  
"Aye, lad. Go on."

"I been thinkin', since...since we do this a lot, you know, cross-faction frat-er-ization, or whatever, since the Spies fixed it so the Announcer and whoever won't catch us...maybe...maybe you could, I dunno, meet him up here. Or something. To talk. He...he hangs out in our Engineer's workshop whenever you come. It's just in the basement. He talks about you sometimes. --Er, not that I eavesdrop or nothin', it's just--well, Solly's real loud and our rooms share a wall, so when he's talkin' to his Shovel or his raccoons, I can kinda hear everything. He...he really misses you."  
And Tavish closed his eye hard.  
Then he wiped his eye with the pad of one thumb, cursing softly.

"Damned powdered sugar. Gets everywere. Never know when it'll start makin' yer eyes go all runny..." he said. After wiping his eye and making a big show to shake off the brown linen apron he was wearing, he shrugged.  
"Ah...anyway...I'm sure he doesn't want to see me."  
"But he does! He--"  
"No, no--"  
"Really, man, I swear, all's you gotta do is--"  
"Scout," Tavish said, more firmly. 

But as the youngest brother out of eight, he knew perfectly well how it sounded when you were choking back how sad, how hurt you really were, to look brave in front of someone else.

The Scout felt awkward and gawky and stupid and incredibly humbled, and like he'd broken something he shouldn't have touched.  
He slowly slid upright, and dropped the spoon he'd licked clean into the sink. Tavish didn't turn to face him, but he knew he was watching him just the same, as he walked to the door.  
"Sorry," he mumbled, and then hurried out of the kitchen.

~

(this is from the RED team)

“For the last time, Scout, no!” the Spy said.  
“Aww--come on! Please? Why not?”

“I am not going to entertain this ridiculous idea any longer,” the Spy said. He walked into the room, slapping at a folded newspaper to get the creases to re-settle.  
The Sniper, who had been asleep in one of the kitchen chairs, twitched slightly and inclined his head.

“Afternoon,” the Spy said, and then tapped his shoulder with the folded paper.  
The Sniper grunted and accepted the paper. A moment later it was in his lap with his arm resting over it, and he was slouching in the chair again, fast asleep.

The Spy was never going to properly understand how he could just DO that around people. (When asked, the Sniper usually explained that they were all professionals, and business associates aside. Though, truth be told, the Sniper hated sleeping in dead silence; his camper’s walls were thin enough that he could hear every outdoor nighttime sound, every hooting owl, every rustle in the bushes. And without SOME ambient sound, he couldn’t sleep at all. Their--his teammates’--voices made him feel safe.)

“So? Come onnnn,” the Scout whined, waving his arms at the Spy.  
“If you can tell me ONE good reason why I should, I will. If you cannot--” the Spy held up one hand--“You WILL stop harassing me about this...this ridiculous--”

“Okay okay okay, geeze!” the Scout said. He took a breath, shook himself out, and then began, “It’s like this--it’ll be funny, see? Those BLUs will be all, ‘Hey, lookit me, I’m gonna go cap this point!’ and then BOOM! BONK! Their heads’re all bashed in! By me! I mean, by a guy in a hotdog costume! It’ll be great for dominations. Make ‘em feel bad, yanno?”

The Spy watched the Scout with mixed amusement and distaste. He had punctuated the entire sentence liberally with hand gestures, and was now standing beside the Spy with his hands in his armpits, long arms crossed over his chest. He was giving the Spy a sidelong smirk and eyebrow waggle so completely hokey it might have come out of a bad American comedy film.

“C’mon, even YOU can’t say that wouldn’t be funny.” the Scout said.  
The Spy DID smile, at that. “You are ridiculous, lapin.”  
“You keep sayin’ that. So is that a yes? Come on. Imagine me, haulin’ ass after that BLU weirdo who smokes his weird-lookin’ cigarettes. You could take pictures! A’me! Killin’ him! While wearin’ a hotdog suit!” 

The Spy rolled his eyes, still smirking. “We will see,” he said, shaking his head.  
“AWW YISS!” the Scout yelled, pumping his fist in the air.  
“That was not a yes!”


	3. Badlands Bad-mouthers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You know how the Scout never seems to take off his headset? In his off-time, the BLU Scout uses his headset to talk to the RED Scout. They talk a lot and become fast friends. Unfortunately for the BLU team, they don’t know who he’s talking to and start to worry about him. The BLU Engineer (who has a two-way radio that can intercept walkie-talkie signals) ends up accidentally listening in and puts two and two together.

“He said WHAT? What a complete load’a bull!” the Scout said.  
He paused a moment, bending to take another shirt from the tub.  
“Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah! That’s right! That’s what I would’a said!” he was saying.

The shirt he was wearing was sticking to his chest with a mix of perspiration and water droplets from the damp shirts he was hanging up. The laundry line--like most personnel equipment at their bases--was improvised, some old rope he’d found and strung from a row of nails already in the wooden walls. 

The late spring sun seemed to be coming straight down, like a hot sheet dropped from the sky, and every now and again he’d pause, pull off his hat, and wipe his face with the hem of his own dampened shirt. 

Down in the valley spanned by the train bridge, lizards were running around, sending small slides of the tawny-pink scree tumbling down to accumulate in the center. The low spots of the drainage ditches were nearly dry, greenish stinking water all but evaporated.  
Summer was on its way. 

Badlands was one of the bases that redefined the words ‘discomfort’ and ‘overheated’. The Scout, accustomed to disgustingly humid New England springs, was beyond caring. He was just glad that, out West, spring rain showers weren’t so common, so he could at least hang laundry outside without fear of having to run back out to gather it all in ten minutes later--sopping wet. 

He’d have taken the heads off of anyone who tried to tease him about it, too. For the first time in his life, he actually _had_ his own laundry--enough of it to hang out all on its own, too. Every blue shirt was his, every faded undershirt, every holey sock, every pair of slack-waistbanded boxers, was his. The novelty of it was a shock, at first. 

Most everything he’d had back home had been third or fourth (or, in the case of his favorite bomber jacket, actually seventh) hand. 

So it wasn’t much--at first. But he liked what he had, and he liked to think he had _some_ nice stuff.

Another thing he’d never, ever admit to was that he liked to show off new outfits on the laundry line first--to let the RED chucklehead get a good look at the cool outfits he’d be wearing while beating his head in during the next match. Along with his half-dozen ordinary blue t-shirts, he had a really nice white button-up that he practically had to beat against a rock to keep clean; his high school letterman jacket--previously the nicest piece of clothing he’d ever owned--and a super-nice baby-blue cardigan that had shown up in his room after a match one day, unannounced, but in his size and everything. 

He also had a pair of black sweatpants with white stripes down the legs, that HAD looked really cool...before he’d washed them with his white undershirts and socks, not realizing that bleach would ruin them. They currently occupied a place of shame, hung to dry over his bed’s metal frame headboard, and he only wore them as pajamas anymore. 

That was to say nothing of the not-so-small collection of accessories. There was his beanie, which the Medic snidely said made him look like a drug addict; the whoopee cap Sniper had gotten him as a joke, but which he wore because he liked it and had wanted one since he was a kid. 

He finished hanging the last item--a long striped scarf the Sniper had knit for him, and stood back, his hands on his hips, grinning.

The RED Scout was hanging out his entire team’s laundry, on long lines dipping between the little outbuilding balcony, over on the RED side.   
They could see each other over the tracks--just over two hundred meters away.   
He was waiting for it, waiting for the other guy to pause and then make a face, maybe flip him off. 

Instead, his jaw almost hit the floor when the other guy shook out a really cool (really futuristic-looking, holy shit) jacket with padded cuffs and shoulders. He hung this beside an equally-cool padded vest (the Scout had snorted; who the fuck wore winter clothes in the effing desert? --but then, he thought, it looked so fucking _cool, he_ wanted one, and he just ended up wondering where the RED jerkass bought his stuff.)

Maybe, he thought, _he_ would be the one flipping the other the bird. Just as he started to, he froze, though, clutching his headset.

“Why’m I hangin’ up a button-up sweater? Hey, fuck YOU, man, it’s real lamb’s woo--uh! I mean, what’s it to ya?” 

He paused, scowling down into the laundry tub at the clothes he still had to hang. Ever the pragmatist, he had simply tossed a handful of clothespins in with the wet clothes; he figured he could just grab them both at the same time.  
“Whaddaya mean, it’ll stretch it out?” 

His hands curled into claws and his elbows came up to either side of his body, almost of their own volition. “WHADDAYA MEAN, YOU CAN’T WASH WOOL IN THE WASHING MACHINE?”

He snatched the cardigan down off the line so fast the rope made a low, hard THUNG sound before swaying back into place, clothespins flying everywhere. Several pairs of his boxers went swinging away on the breeze, to land in the dirt under the balcony.  
He didn’t see; was running inside, the cardigan clutched in one fist, panic written all over his face.

~

The Scout came barreling into the kitchen moments later, nearly upsetting a bowl of freshly-shelled peas set on a chair beside the table.

The Engineer was humming and shelling more peas. His gloves were off and was using his creepy mechanical hand, the fingers moving slowly in counterpart to the human ones.  
The Scout was already talking before really looking at him. 

“Engie! Engie, you gotta help me!” He froze and stared at the hand--he figured he’d never get used to it--and blurted, “Why are you doin’...that. With, uh. That?”   
“Gotta hone fine control somehow, don’t I?” he chuckled a little.

“Ah. Uh. Okay,” the Scout said. A moment later he remembered the garment cradled in his hands.

“Okay, okay, so you gotta help me, I wasn’t paying attention when I did my laundry earlier and I didn’t know you wasn’t s’posed’ta stick wool stuff in the washing machine, I mean, who the fuck even _does_ that--makes clothes you can’t just, y’know, wash? --Anyway I don’t even remember where I got this sweater from but I washed it the wrong way, and it’s--do you think i fucked it up? Like, permanently?”  
And he held the garment out for the Engineer to see. 

The older man dropped the last of the peas into the bowl, dropped the husk into the pile on the table, and lifted his goggles--mercifully with his human hand.  
“Well, to be honest, Scout, it looks fine to me.”  
The younger man heaved a sigh of relief.  
Then the Engineer added, “But, to be fair, I’m not a textile engineer. I’m not at-all sure about the tensile strength of wool, or the types of stresses it’d tolerate before givin’ up on ya--”  
The Scout’s face crumpled up again, and the Engineer began to hastily backpedal, “Well, Scout, what I mean is--well, er--why don’t you jest go and ask Spy? He’s always well-dressed.”  
The young man’s face fell for a moment, before he brightened. “Yeah...hey, yeah! Spy! SPY! WHERE ARE YA! I SWEAR I DIDN’T BREAK NOTHIN’, I JUST WANNA ASK YOU SOMETHIN’!” the Scout hollered, as he went tearing out of the kitchen.  
The Engineer chuckled, shook his head, and went back to the peas.

~

“Has anyone else noticed our resident yap-dog has been acting more...addle-brained than usual?” the Spy asked, the next evening.

He was buttering a roll, his legs crossed and a magazine spread open across his lap.   
The Engineer could see the corner of the pages; it was one of the men’s fashion magazines he got from Europe, which was why it was half-hidden under the table. Most of them were messy eaters, and he was loath to dirty the pages of his style spread. 

The Engineer glanced up at him and blinked blandly.   
“Do ya mean the laundry?” he asked.   
“No. Although fortunately now, the mistakes he makes with the bleach only involve his _own_ clothing.” the Spy said.

The Heavy made a thoughtful rumble, and then said, “Leetle Scout has not used bleach in weeks, since ruining pair of black sweat-pants.”  
The Spy made a snide, pleased noise. “Ah. So, he is learning.”

“Oh, ja, and throwing tantrums with every ‘lesson’.” the Medic added. He was meticulously loading peas onto his fork with his knife, three peas into every slot between the fork’s tines, then up to his mouth and back down again.

The Engineer looked between the Medic and the Spy hazarded his own guess. “You mean the talkin’-to-himself thing?”

“Oui, of course. Now that he has abandoned the thought of ever having a conversational partner, somehow he is ten times as annoying, and ten times as disturbing.” the Spy said archly.

He looked over at the Scout’s empty seat at the table, and shifted in his chair.  
The Medic added, “And he has begun skipping meals, or coming late. I do not think this is a good--”

“Hey, great! Food’s still here!” the Scout announced, to no one in particular.  
He strolled in and was only there long enough to load his plate--taking two of everything, as he always did--and then flicking the brim of his cap at the Engineer and grinning at the Spy.  
“Thanks, Spy. Smells terrific!”

He was already back out in the hall when the Engineer called after him, “You remember to bring that plate back to the kitchen, now, hear?”  
The Scout waved one hand without looking back.

The Engineer settled back in his chair, turning his head to find six and a half pairs of eyes staring at him. 

“Well, shoot. Ain’t like anybody else here talks to the poor boy. What do you expect him to do? And, hell. He’s just a kid. Prob’ly doin’ it to get a rise outta us. Jest leave him be, he’ll be tired of it in a week.”

~

But he wasn’t.  
Whenever he wasn’t on the field, now, he was wandering in the halls, or batting rocks off at the horizon, or jogging around outside--chattering to himself.

Most of the time his little one-sided conversations were amicable. Other times he would argue--jokingly, of course. And all of this, seemingly with no one.

~

It was nine days before someone stopped the Engineer about it.  
One afternoon--while he was up to his armpits in the sparking sentry-wreckage aftermath of the RED Spy’s work--he heard footsteps over the rickety wooden floor and looked up to see the Scout careen through the building, gleefully screeching, “ _LOOK_ at you! You look like you ran through traffic!” to--no one.

Moments later he flushed the RED Scout and the RED Heavy--who was out of ammo, it seemed--out of a hiding place behind one of the big rocks. 

He watched the Scout ignore a perfect, easy target--a Heavy with no ammunition!--to rocket around him, snatching his bat out of his bag and chasing the other Scout.  
“ _I_ am the Scout here! This map ain’t big enough for the two of us!”

They disappeared under the bridge, into the general fray of the battle, and he could hear the muted metallic sounds of a bat impacting against flesh, overlaid with someone else’s pained yelps.

The Engineer was so distracted with the sight that he didn’t register the red dot that had traveled lazily up his body until it was too late.  
They lost the match before he made it back out of Respawn.

The BLU Heavy was already there, frowning and massaging his left shoulder, where the RED Spy must have gotten him. There was no scar there--or mark of any kind--but of course Respawn did not remove the psychological effects, the psychosomatic sensation of a mortal wound, that sometimes remained long after the injury itself had been healed.  
The mind, he reflected, was probably not made for such things as Respawn.

He had to curtail the train of thought, however, when the Heavy turned and lumbered over to him.  
“Engineer...am worried about leetle Scout,” the Heavy said. “And leetle Scout is worrying rest of team.”

“I know,” the Engineer said, nodding and waving a hand as if to ward away the Heavy’s words, “I know, he’s been talkin’ to himself. Like I said, he’s a kid; jest leave him be, and--” 

“No, no. Is more than that now. He is talking...all the time. Makes people--other people on team--nervous. Soldier, especially.”

The Engineer looked around, feeling not-quite-helpless, but very frustrated.  
“Well, why in tarnation are you tellin’ _me_ all of this?” he finally asked.  
“You are one who talks to Scout the most,” the Heavy said, quietly. “If Scout is having problems...you are best person to talk to him.”

~

The Engineer sighed, running his hand over his stubbly scalp. Absently he reminded himself to shave his head again--whenever he got the chance, which at the rate he was going was going to be on the fifth of never.

He didn’t know why everyone always assumed he knew how to talk to people; a handful of Ph.ds didn’t actually mean he had excellent conversational skills. Mostly he got by just by sheer bluntness, and usually considered himself lucky. 

He plucked at the collar of his shirt, sighing again, privately wishing that the Builders’ League wasn’t QUITE so cheap; the only room in the entire base that had actual air conditioning was the combined dining room and rec room. All the rooms in the dormotiries had to rely on fans, and his work-shed didn’t even have the benefit of proper insulation. 

He’d tried to wait until late in the day, when he knew the Scout wouldn’t be jogging or in the kitchen pestering the Spy, or out begging the Sniper to teach him how to use his bow. Nights, he knew the young man reserved for reading, or writing letters to his family back home. 

He didn’t know where he expected to find the Scout, but out on the upper deck was not the place. He stopped just around the corner, where he could look over and see the young man, but the Scout couldn’t see him.

“Heh, yeah,” the Scout said. He was sitting splay-legged on the balcony with a zinc washtub between his knees, carefully sloshing something back and forth in the water. There was a bottle of conditioner on the deck beside him, a damp ring around its base.  
“Oh, naw, our Spy told me how to save it. Yeah, yeah, laugh all’s you want, he said it’ll be good as new. An’ shuddup, Mr. Rogers WISHES his sweaters look as cool as mine’s gonna look, all splattered with your’n’your teams brains’n’shit!” 

The Engineer leaned a bit to the side, and could now see out--over the bridge--over to the RED side, where the RED Scout was sitting with his legs dangling over the RED deck. He seemed to be polishing a boot.   
Or pretending to; the Engineer saw he saw more or less just wiping the rag he had in one hand back and forth over the boot’s toe.

The Scout snorted a laugh. “Yeah, yeah. Hey, I still think your Soldier’s a creep for collectin’ heads. Your Demoman, too! Geez, whadda they do with ‘em? Ugh, ya know what, never mind. Don’t tell me.”

~

“Aw, shoot. Ain’t nothin’ but puppy love,” the Engineer said.  
The BLU Soldier’s bone-grinding grip on his shovel did not loosen, however.   
“I oughta go over there and brain the little RED maggot now. Scare the hell out of our Scout, too! Shock some sense into him. He’s just playing with him! REDs are NOT to be trusted!”

~

Sometimes, when he was working in his workshop late at night, the Engineer could swear his two-way radio would pick up faint voices, familiar laughter, the tones of someones’ voices low and rubbed soft and thin through static and distance.  
And he would smile a little, and shake his head a little, and turn the radio off.


	4. Antique Shopping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The shopping day was Miss Pauling’s idea, actually. She’d told them that they had done such an excellent job beating back the GRAY robot hordes that the Announcer had agreed to allot them some vacation time.
> 
> Right before hitting them with the whammy that they all had to spend it together--they didn’t have the budget to buy them individual bus tickets, let alone train or plane tickets, so they were stuck in Southwest Bumfuck Nowhere, in a town whose ‘shopping center’ consisted of a single outdoor strip mall. There was a grocery store flanked on both sides by a dry-cleaner’s, a tailor shop, a cobbler’s shop (the RED Engineer had made appreciative noises about the cowboy boots on display in the shop’s dusty window) and the source of the Scouts’ misery--a very large, very foreboding-looking antique store.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of a larger arc i've been working on. For reference: in this universe, the teams had to join forces to fight the GRAY robot armies.

This was the BLU Soldier’s fault. This was the BLU Soldier’s fault, and the Scouts were going to die of boredom.  
“Man, do we HAVETA go with you guys into the store? Can’t we just wait out here?” the BLU Scout griped.  
Both Medics gave him a stern, very annoyed look. 

The RED Scout mumbled, “View’s better out here, too...” as a pair of very built, very attractive guys in tight jeans and Stetsons walked past.  
One of them gave him an up-and-down glance and winked.  
He grinned back.

The BLU Medic spoke first. “No, you may not remain outside! The last time we left the two of you outside a store, HE,” the Medic flicked his frigid glare at the BLU Scout, “Tried to wheedle phone numbers from two policewomen and a watch salesman, all of whom were twice his age, and NONE of whom were interested!”

“Aw, geez,” the BLU Scout groaned, and his RED counterpart elbowed him in the side, laughing. “Hey, buddy, don’t worry. Nobody strikes out all the time!”  
The BLU Medic pinched the bridge of his nose. 

“We are going inside.” He paused and looked back at the store’s entrance, where the two Heavies were already staring inside at a bookcase laden with old, thick-spined books. Both of them were practically salivating.  
“And the two of YOU are coming with us. Or else you are going back to the Sniper’s camper.”

The young men exchanged a glance, then looked back at the Medic. The BLU Scout actually clasped his hands as if praying, while the RED Scout took off his hat and tried his best to make puppydog-eyes.  
The BLU Medic sighed. “Without the keys.”

“Aw, geez!” the BLU Scout said. “What the hell kinda deal is that?”  
“The kind of deal that does not involve you going to prison--AGAIN--or wrecking the Sniper’s van and our primary mode of transportation to and from base,” the BLU Medic said. 

“But that’s so boring,” the RED Scout groaned. “Doc--c’mon, man, can’t we just go into one’a the other stores? We ain’t kids, an’ we won’t break no...” his words trailed off abruptly.

The handsome cowboys were coming back. They’d gotten ice-cream cones, and the one who had winked at the RED Scout was enjoying his a bit too sensuously for it to be unintentional.  
The Scout’s eyes were glued to him as he walked past.

The BLU Scout elbowed him a little. “Wow, man, wanna ask him if he wants to get a room?”  
The RED Scout remembered himself as the guys walked around a corner, and shoved the BLU Scout lightly. “Shut up, chucklenuts.”

The BLU Scout swayed in place, giggling. “’Cause, y’know, if you wanna ask him to get a room...” and he had to dodge when the RED Scout took a half-hearted swing at him.  
The BLU Medic sighed again, annoyed, and cut in, “Neither of you will be asking ANYONE if they want a room! Man, woman, or otherwise!”

“Aw, gee, Doc! Do ya mean we won’t need to?” the RED Scout asked. “If we’re real good, I mean?”  
He gave the Medic a very slow up-and-down look, pausing at the older man’s crotch, before giving him a crooked smile.  
The BLU Medic blushed to his hairline. “I--I am not--”

The RED Medic laughed and took the BLU Medic’s arm. “Ah, do not let the boy make you nervous! He is actually very accommodating,” the Medic said. “He would not do anything you did not like.”

The BLU Medic looked completely flabbergasted, which the RED Medic did not notice, because he was turning to call the BLU Heavy to come and collect him.  
The RED Heavy was the one who herded the Scouts inside, one big hand clamped on either of their shoulders. 

“Okay, okay, we get it, geeze!” the BLU Scout said, wriggling free of his grasp.  
“Go have fun with your geezer, ya big bald bear,” the RED Scout said.  
“Before I go, I must have assurance that leetle Scouts will behave and not sneak off to do naughty things,” he said, his hands behind his back, “Like bad leetle rabbits.”  
The Scouts looked at each other. 

“Well, we ain’t gonna sneak nowhere and fuck,” the RED Scout said. “Nobody brought lube or rubbers.”  
The BLU Scout elbowed him in the side, blushing so hard his nose and ears were tomato-red.

“What? Relax, man, it’s true! We won’t.” the RED Scout threw his arms wide. “Okay?”  
Just as he was going to turn around, his hand whacked the fronds of an artificial fern. The fern was in a huge Chinese porcelain vase set ridiculously close to the doors.  
The vase wobbled, fake fern and all, and the Scout had to lunge to grab it and stop it from falling over and shattering.

When he turned around, the Heavy was giving him a flat, bland stare.  
“Public fornication is least of my worries,” he said. “Things in this store are expensive, and we have no spare money to waste buying things because naughty BLU or naughty RED broke them,” he said, very slowly.

The BLU Scout squirmed slightly. The RED Scout shrugged and rolled his eyes.  
“I will give reward to BOTH leetle rabbits, if they can wait patiently while we are in the store. All right?” the Heavy continued.  
“Do ya mean s--” the RED Scout didn’t finish, because the BLU Scout elbowed him in the side.

“Uh, yeah! That’ll be great, man! Anyway, you better catch up with the Doc--your Medic--before they see all the cool old sh--uh, stuff before you do! Okaygreatseeyalaterbye!” the BLU Scout said.  
The Heavy gave him a nonplussed look, shook his head a little, and then turned to follow the doctors. 

“Geez, what the hell’s wrong with YOU? You’re so twitchy allova sudden!” the RED Scout said to his BLU companion.  
The BLU Scout widened his eyes and turned his head very, very slowly, still staring straight ahead. After a moment, he looked back at the RED Scout, with an unblinking, wide stare.

“What, ya see a ghost or somethin’? That Merasmus guy? Thought he only came around on the holidays? Where’s he at, anyways? Behind me?” the RED Scout said.  
The BLU Scout grabbed him by the arms and repeated the same motion.  
“...Oookay, man, you’re startin’ to weird me out, man...”

The BLU Scout jabbed him in the chest with one finger, then repeated The Look again.  
Finally, the RED Scout followed his gaze, to where a thin, waspish old woman was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, behind a polished, gleaming wooden countertop. She had white hair pulled back into an old-fashioned bun, and was wearing a dark green dress with a high white lacy collar. There was a post-card rack to her right, more big dusty fake plants in fancy vases to her right and left. Looming behind her, there was a huge wooden bookcase with big cubbies full of old curiosities--Japanese theater masks, opera fans, folded framed lacy gloves, weird paintings of crying clowns, a ceramic bust of a woman with really big Marie Antoinette hair.

The old woman’s hands were steepled together in front of her, and her sharp, beady gray eyes were on them, and the RED Scout realized, with a cold feeling, that she had probably been watching them the entire time. 

“Eh...heh heh heh...s’cuse us,” he chuckled, feeling like a colossal dork, and then grabbed the BLU Scout’s wrist and dragged him down the aisle leading to the right, in the opposite direction than the one everyone else had gone down.

~

The shopping day was Miss Pauling’s idea, actually. She’d told them that they had done such an excellent job beating back the GRAY robot hordes that the Announcer had agreed to allot them some vacation time.

Right before hitting them with the whammy that they all had to spend it together--they didn’t have the budget to buy them individual bus tickets, let alone train or plane tickets, so they were stuck in Southwest Bumfuck Nowhere, in a town whose ‘shopping center’ consisted of a single outdoor strip mall. There was a grocery store flanked on both sides by a dry-cleaner’s, a tailor shop, a cobbler’s shop (the RED Engineer had made appreciative noises about the cowboy boots on display in the shop’s dusty window) and the source of the Scouts’ misery--a very large, very foreboding-looking antique store. 

It was nearly the same size as the grocery store next door, and the Scouts were very much not looking forward to spending any of their precious vacation time up to their asses in breakable old junk, trapped inside a building that smelled like someone’s stuffy attic.  
The problem was, they didn’t have a choice.

The BLU Soldier had noticed an antique American flag hanging in the window, shouted something about buying a piece of real American history, and then marched inside. The RED Demoman, Tavish, had followed with a good-natured shrug. Everyone else had gone in after them, murmuring about interesting or weird things they saw in the windows--a remarkably badly-taxidermed rooster that the RED Sniper thought was hilarious; a beautiful pocket-watch with a gold-and-brass chain, pillowed on wine-colored satin inside a red-lacquered box that both the Spies stopped to stare at.  
The Scouts had been hopelessly outnumbered before they even got a chance to complain. 

~

The RED Engineer stood next to a card rack bristling with sun-faded postcards. The BLU Soldier stood beside him, frowning thoughtfully at a trio of dusty brass cherubs holding bows and little silver arrows hung on the wall. The way they were placed implied that they were chasing one another and trying to shoot each other in the behind.  
He watched the Scouts rush past, moving with uncharacteristic silence over the faded, worn-down Persian runners underfoot.

“Huh. Says here in the brochure that they’ve even got antiques from the American Civil War.” the RED Engineer said.  
“FASCINATING!” the BLU Soldier said. “Union, I hope. ANY GEAR BELONGING THOSE DAMN REBS OUGHT TO BE PUT INTO A MUSEUM DEDICATED TO FAILURE AND UN-AMERICAN-NESS.”  
The RED Engineer made a noise of assent.

The BLU Soldier amended, “You’re all right, it’s not your fault you’re a Texan.”  
The RED Engineer snorted a little. “Let’s jest see what they have, before we go re-drawin’ the Mason-Dixon line through the base.”  
After a moment, he muttered, “Now, if only we could FIND the darned stuff...”

“When we do, I am going to buy Tavish the fanciest, most OBSCENELY FANCY cavalry saber they have!” The BLU Soldier announced. He paused again. “Do you think he’d like sabers? Mostly he has broadswords...”

“Well, I don’t know from a knife, so I do apologize, but you’re askin’ the wrong person,” the Engineer said, chuckling. He had unfolded the brochure and was frowning at the map printed inside it. “But I reckon he’ll like anything you get for him.” 

If the map was anything to go by, the place was absolutely labyrinthine, with more booths and stalls and mini-stores inside it than he could easily count. There also seemed to be a second and third floor--or, well, properly, a basement, a ground floor, and a second floor.  
He made a thoughtful noise and turned the map over.

“Ah! There we go! Looks like sections are divided by color and theme...Now, we’re here, in section Lavender, in front of Booth Number 2.”  
“That is not lavender, that is lilac,” the BLU Soldier corrected.  
“...Well, in that case, we’re here, in front of Booth Number 16.” The Engineer looked up from the map, his face screwed up in confusion. “What in tarnation...!”

“Well, a poorly-made map is about as un-American as you can get! I am going to COMPLAIN to the OWNER!” The BLU Soldier yelled, and stomped off--passing a row of mannequins dressed in moth-eaten wool dusters that looked to be from the ‘twenties--before turning a corner. 

He returned a moment later, scratching his head. “The STINK of MOTHBALLS must be interfering with my OTHERWISE-FLAWLESS sense of direction! I SEEM to have made a WRONG TURN!”  
The Engineer sighed. “I have a feelin’ we’re gonna be takin’ a lot of those, today.”

One such wrong turn led them into a booth guarded by a mannequin dressed in a faded gray-and-white-striped railroad engineer uniform. There was even a small, dusty railroad engineer’s cap tilted on the mannequin’s head. 

“Take a look at this, Hard-hat!” the Soldier plucked the hat off the mannequin and, before the Engineer could say anything, the Soldier was tugging the hat down on his head.  
“Not bad, Engie!” the Soldier said, his fists on his hips, and chuckled at the Engineer’s sheepish expression.

The Texan didn’t have long to be embarrassed, though; looking over the Soldier’s shoulder, he saw a waist-high wooden shelf covered with brown felt and bearing up a fine array of very old, very rusty machine parts.

“Old-fashioned railroad tools! I wonder if--” the Engineer’s smile turned into a wide grin, “THEY DO!” He snatched something out of a wood-slat box on the shelf--a rusty, dented piece of indiscriminate machinery, and held it up, grinning.  
“Hot damn, Soldier, do you know what this stuff is? It’s--”

“--A rail car drip cup. From a locomotive probably built around 1919, looks like. I am surprised it is in such good condition!” the Soldier said.

The Engineer’s face actually went slack for a moment, shocked that the Soldier knew anything about trains at all. After that, though, his grin spread back across his face.  
“Well, I’ll be! What do you know about trains?”

“That they were one of the most EFFICIENT MEANS of military transport in BOTH World Wars! Also that these railroad spikes are COUNTERFEIT!”  
The Soldier grabbed and shook two of the offending items--rail spikes with neat little glued-on labels claiming they were from 1869.  
The Engineer adjusted his goggles. “Well, how can ya tell that? Look jest like regular rail spikes to me...”  
“Because THESE are not GOLD-PLATED!” 

The Engineer’s face went slack again. “...What, now?”  
The Soldier scoffed. “Every schoolboy knows that the Overland Route was built by genius Chinese engineers, with gold spikes custom-minted by Abraham Lincoln HIMSELF! Why do you think there was such a push to get to California? They needed more GOLD so they could lay more RAIL! Those Pony Express boys could only run the stuff so far!” 

The Engineer sighed softly and shook his head. (He missed the way the Soldier’s lips twitched, as if he was fighting back a laugh.)

“Well,” he said, “I suppose someone must have stripped off the plating, then...”  
“A DAMNED UN-AMERICAN SHAME!” the Soldier said, and threw the spikes back in the box, disgusted.

The entire shelf holding the box collapsed, and the two of them had to jump back to avoid the clanging, clattering shower of old machinery that came crashing to the ground.  
They exchanged a glance, before the Engineer sighed again.  
The Soldier groaned softly. They began picking up the scattered rusty machinery.

~

The RED Sniper and the Spies had gone just far enough into the maze to find an interesting booth, and did not care if they were lost.

(The RED Spy had a vague sense of hope that the Sniper’s excellent natural sense of direction would save them. He, himself, had been memorizing their turns, but an attempt to go back the way they had come had left them in a room he did not recall passing through.)

Currently, they stood together in a room in which there was a dining table set for twelve--the table a huge, imposing slab of oak, with a yellowed Cluny lace runner and several doilies used as placemats, beneath a dreadfully dated English dinner service. 

Arranged against the wall behind the table, completing the dreary tableau, there were three kitchen armoires, each housing porcelain figurines--the BLU Spy spotted several imitation Hummels and even a worrisomely melted-looking ersatz Lladro faun--and more unattractive china. Stuffed into every available space--between the armoires and against the spare walls--there were several armchairs in various stages of decay.

The RED Spy noticed a Japanese vase that was part of the table’s centerpiece; tutting softly, he picked it up.  
“Spoiling such a lovely vase with such hideous artificial blooms,” he said, in cajoling tones, and began murmuring sweet nothings at the beautiful ceramic piece. He plucked the faded velvet roses out of the vase and dropped them onto the tabletop.

“Pssh. Waste of flowers in general, pickin’ ‘em an’ stickin’ ‘em in little bottles to slowly rot. If you ask me.” the Sniper said. He had his hands in his pockets and was looking around himself apprehensively, rather as if he was afraid of breaking something--or of something falling over and breaking HIM.  
“Ah, you WOULD be a cynic. What are flowers for, if not to be admired?” the RED Spy asked.

“You are asking a pointless question,” the BLU Spy replied. “If he is anything like our Sniper, he is a ruthless minimalist who sees no point in ‘frippery’ of any kind.”  
“I admire flowers,” the Sniper groused, defensively. “Long as they’re in their proper places, growin’ inna dirt. Why take ‘em inside to let ‘em die faster? All I’m sayin’ is, nobody needs all this--” the RED Sniper gestured around dismissively, “This junk.”  
“You are saying you would rather live in a house with one chair, no sofa, a wooden crate for a table, and probably only one place-setting,” the RED Spy said. “How positively sad.”

“Not sad!” the Sniper said. “Practical! Look at--look at this!” he snatched a dusty, yellowed doily off the back of one chintz-patterned armchair, and held it at arm’s length.  
“What the bloody hell use is this to ANYONE?” he demanded.  
The RED Spy laughed a little. He was still fondling the vase.

“Monsieur Bleu, what do you think? Objets d’art, or garbage?” the RED Spy asked.  
The BLU Spy was flipping through a cardboard cigar box full of old photographs. He’d seated himself in a chair with a paper DO NOT SIT sign hanging on the back.  
He shrugged one shoulder. “Most of the things here are junk, M’sieur Rouge; you know that. Like this broken-down armchair they are trying to pass off as a Victorian-era Hepplewhite.”  
“A what?” the Sniper asked.

The BLU Spy gave him a pitying look; the RED Spy chuckled some more and said, “Formerly, a furniture manufacturer, from some time ago. Now, a style of furniture still rather popular with the moneyed set.” he looked back at the BLU Spy. “So, you know furniture, then?”

The BLU Spy looked up, a sheaf of photos in either hand. “M’sieur Rouge, I was a thief. It is my job to be able to spot anything of potential value, and be able to assess it on the spot...”  
The RED Sniper sighed. “Right. And how often did you make off with the furniture from your marks’ houses?” 

“Only once,” the Spy said, shuffling the photographs he’d selected into a neat pile. He dropped the rest back into the box. He placed the box back on top of the dinner table and stood up, brushing wrinkles from his pants. “The mark in question was sneaking important documents around the country by printing them onto the canvas webbing used to reinforce chair backs, beneath the upholstery. I found this out and had to impersonate first a confused wallpaper-hanger, then an inebriated garbage man, and finally a distraught mime, in order to bring the chairs back to my client.”

The Sniper had been watching the Frenchman with a steadily growing expression of disbelief on his face, until finally when his eyebrows could go no higher, he snorted and slapped his thigh.  
“A mime?” he asked, disbelief making his voice dry.

“Oui,” the BLU Spy said. He gave the Sniper an arch look. “It was the best excuse for having an entire party’s worth of furniture stashed in the back of a hearse.”

“Oh, this is a story I have GOT to hear,” the Sniper said. He pulled out one of the dinner chairs--plucking up the yellowed lace doilies that had been draped over the arms and dropping them unceremoniously into a basket on the table. The basket already contained several faded paisley scarves, yellowed white handkerchiefs with even yellower lace edgings, and what appeared to be an entire set of ghastly embroidered napkins (whose design was either melting purple pansies or a parade of purple ghosts).

The RED Spy joined them, still cradling the vase, as the BLU Spy settled back down in his counterfeit chair, and began to tell them his story.

~

The Scouts were completely lost.  
They had forgotten to get a map.

“They gotta have baseball stuff in here somewhere, right?” the BLU asked. “I mean. Old shit’s kinda what these places are all about.”

“Yeah,” the RED said. “Wish we’d grabbed a map...looks like this place is freakin’ huge.”  
They rounded a corner and the BLU Scout almost blinded himself on the spear-head of a flagpole, from which a decaying American flag was hung. Dust was thick in the fringe along its edges, and it was so faded the red was rust-colored, the blue tinged faintly with green and yellow where the sun had eaten it. 

It was sticking out of a flagpole stand between two mannequins wearing antique military uniforms, one Navy and one Army, with moth-holes eaten in them.  
“Ugh. Ya think this the one Solly was talkin’ about?” the BLU Scout mumbled. He pushed the spearhead away gingerly.  
The RED Scout screwed up his face. “Can’t be. We ain’t nowhere near a window.”  
“Oh, yeah, huh.”

To the side of the mannequins there was a narrow doorway, opening into another booth.  
“Probably just musty old clothes an’ junk,” the BLU said, frowning at the mannequins.  
Still, they stepped around the flagpole, squinting into the dim interior. 

“Whoa,” the Scouts breathed, in unison. “1920s stuff!”  
“Al Capone,” the RED Scout whispered.  
“Bonnie’n’Clyde,” the BLU murmured.  
They looked at one another, then back at the booth.  
Then, at the same time, they shouted, “I WANNA BE BONNIE!”

~

“You make a pretty hot chick,” the BLU Scout said. “I’d fuck you.”  
The RED Scout snorted and adjusted the rhinestone headband. “Dumbass, you HAVE fucked me.” he paused. “I mean, I fucked YOU.”  
“Whatever. All’s I’m sayin’ is, I dunno if I’m gay or straight or what, but if I saw a chick wearin’ that dress...”

“Relax, man. What’s that junk the Hippies keep sayin’? Free love, an’ all that. Just make sure you wear a rubber, ‘cause even if you only fuck girls, you can still get, like, warts’n’shit. I usedta know this guy, Mike, who swore up’n’down you didn’t need ta wear one, long as you didn’t jizz inside whoever you was fuckin’, an’ he ended up with, like, this GROWTH on his--”  
“Aw, geez, man, c’mon, I don’t wanna think about that...” the BLU muttered, covering his face.

The RED Scout was wearing a pale-gold-colored sheath dress he’d found on a mannequin, heavy with embroidery and rhinestones all along its hem. He’d also found, on one of those creepy wig-heads, one of those headbands flappers wore, and had slipped it on for added effect. The headband was spangled with rhinestones and had a big ostrich-feather plume over one ear. He kept fiddling with it in the peeling ‘20s-deco-style mirror propped in a corner of the booth.

The BLU Scout was sitting in a dusty old bamboo director’s chair, drowning in a double-breasted nightmare of a suit with shoulder pads wide enough to land an airplane on. He’d also found a pair of brogues with ratty mouse-chewed gabardine spats. The elastic on one of the spats had given out, and it was loose and kept twisting sideways. 

“Al Capone died of the clap. D’you know that?” the BLU Scout said, after a moment.  
The RED Scout turned his head slightly, his eyes widening. “No way.”  
“Yeah! I read it in one of Doc Conagher’s books. I guess, if you catch the real bad kind, it, uh, goes to your brain?”

The RED Scout shuddered. “That’s pretty fuckin’ awful.”  
“That’s freakin’ terrifyin’! I don’t get how you’re--and--it’s--and you can go to sleep at night!”  
“Who said I always do the kinda stuff you even need rubbers for?” the RED Scout said, turning around slowly.

The BLU Scout glanced around quickly--but the booth was a corner booth, almost totally enclosed with racks and racks of old clothes, the narrow entryway flanked by the mannequins in their ancient, rotting uniforms. 

The store was quiet around them, and dim; the only light came from the old chandelier overhead, which looked like it needed to be rewired, because its bulbs were dim as candle-light.  
When no one came, he stood up slowly. His hands were sweaty.  
The RED Scout grinned. 

“HERE we go!” he said, triumphant--and then backed the BLU Scout up against a wall, between a wardrobe full of fur coats and the naked mannequin whose dress he’d borrowed.

Their lips were on each other’s, and they were sliding their hands all over each other, and the BLU Scout glanced twice at the entryway before realizing that he could barely even see out--and if he couldn’t see OUT, he reasoned, no one else could see IN, either.  
The RED Scout pressed a wet kiss to his ear; he flinched, snickering, and then they were going at it again. BLU Scout liked his back rubbed and would kind of sigh and moan in pleasure whenever his partners did, while RED Scout would squirm all over the place in pleasure if you played with his nipples a little.  
Still...

“Your Heavy said he’d give us a reward if we didn’t,” the BLU Scout mumbled, against the RED’s cheekbone.  
“How’s he gonna know?” the RED asked, grinning. “C’mon...”

“No, wait, man, seriously, what if this place has, like, echoes or whatever, an’ he hears us?”  
“You kiddin’? This place is so fulla junk, I bet you couldn’t even hear someone if they was screamin’ at the top’a their lungs. Relax...”

“...Okay. But if any’a the guys from the team--or that creepy owner lady--if ANYBODY comes over here, I swear to god, I’m bailin’ an’ leavin’ your ass behind!” the BLU Scout warned.  
The RED Scout snorted. “Like you could outrun me!”  
The BLU Scout rolled his eyes. “Like I HAVE to, with that chub you got in your pants right now!”  
“I ain’t wearin’ pants, numbnuts,” the RED Scout said, leering.

They stared at each other a moment--RED in the slinky silky dress that he would never, ever admit he really, really liked the feeling of, against his skin, and BLU feeling swamped in the suit that could probably have comfortably fit the Heavy.  
Then they gave up on that train of thought and made out some more, their hands straying under the borrowed clothes. 

~

The BLU Pyro was wearing a white sundress printed with yellow mums, over their casual coverall--a mechanic’s coverall with a nametag replaced with a class insignia patch. The RED Pyro was wearing a pair of brown overalls--the kind with over-the-shoulder straps--over a baggy red button-up. They had both kept their gloves and masks, though the BLU Pyro was wearing a straw sun-hat over theirs. 

They were digging through a bin of old scarves, pulling out all the polyester ones, because those crinkled and writhed in a most amusing way when burned, and the smoke was acrid and chemical-sweet. 

The RED Pyro tapped the BLU and made a pleased noise, holding up a large (and very unattractive) brown and gold paiseley scarf that had a golf ball-sized hole in its center. 

The BLU Pyro’s armload of scarves were all similarly damaged, ladders, snags, and tears marring the glistening, satiny surfaces. They poked a finger through a hole in a screamingly loud green scarf, and wiggled it around, humming happily. They were going to take these things that people had thrown away and make them beautiful again. 

They looked away a moment later, wondering where the rest of the team was, and what they were looking at. Maybe there were other old things that would be beautiful if they set them on fire...?

~

“I do not understand,” the BLU Medic muttered, “How we could have gotten SO completely lost. We followed the map exactly!”

“The bookcases were even beside a window,” the RED Medic said. “I supposed it would be as easy as walking inside and turning right. How wrong I was.”

The Heavies were frowning at the map and muttering in Russian; the Medics stood near a shelf that held nothing but beautiful (but lamentably damaged) porcelain figurines.  
“Mein mutter had several of these, when I was a boy,” the BLU Medic murmured. He picked up a porcelain lamb, then frowned at it.  
“This--this is an imitation!”  
“This one has been broken twice and re-glued,” the RED Medic said. He was holding a mare with woefully crooked legs.

Across the way, where the Heavies were standing, was a mini-store that was set up like a cookware shop, ancient cooking implements dangling from racks and piled up on the metal shelves. Several cast-iron dutch ovens, many missing their lids, stood in a row on the lowest shelf; above them, cookie cutters, biscuit cutters, pastry wheels, and corn-cob-shaped cornbread pans, propped against the wall for the display.  
Everything had an unsavory layer of dust, and several things were spotted orange-brown with rust. 

~

The booth was full of musical instruments, most obviously too old to be played anymore. Unstrung violins and guitars were hung haphazardly on the walls. There was a baby grand piano, its keys yellow and uneven, with an age-spotted brass music rest on its top, and another vase of faded velvet roses.  
The RED Sniper wrinkled his nose.

There was a soft rustle of movement and he spun around, instinctively reaching for a knife that wasn’t there--  
\--And the BLU Sniper straightened up from where he’d been kneeling, behind a small bookshelf on the other side of the piano. In one hand he was holding a tarnish-spotted tenor saxophone.

“You play?” the BLU Sniper asked, running his fingers over the antique saxophone.  
When they came back with a layer of dust coating them, he frowned slightly.  
“Ahh, yeah. S’a nice enough hobby. Wanted to be in one of them big bands, when I was a kid,” the RED Sniper said.  
The BLU Sniper made a soft, thoughtful grunt. “What stopped you?”  
“For big bands, you need a big city. Never did manage to make it to one of those,” he said, smiling a little and shrugging.  
“Aw. Sorry, mate.”  
“Eh. Life’s what it is.”

~

“Tavish!” the BLU Soldier said, smiling. He was holding a something long and narrow behind his back, and when the RED Demoman walked over, he pulled it out with a flourish.  
“I bought you a sword,” he said, shyly. 

It WAS an obscenely fancy saber, the hand-guard made of elaborately-worked brass patterned to look like leaves and thistle flowers. A dull-gold-colored tassel hung from its pommel, and the sheath was supple black leather with a scrolled brass endcap.  
“Aww, it’s perfect! Thank ya, Janey love!” Tavish said. Without thinking--or maybe because he didn’t realize the owner was right there, because she looked like part of one of the displays--he slipped an arm around the other man’s waist and gave him a peck on the cheek.

Which earned a scandalized noise and a disapproving glare from the store owner, who looked like if she clutched her pearls any harder she’d crush them.  
The RED Scout made a face at her.  
“Awww, suck it up, you old prune! Ain’t you never seen two people mindin’ their own business? Huh? Why’n’cha try minding YOURS?”  
“Well, I NEVER! That uppity--and HOMOSEXUALS! Well, I--”  
“Aaaah, find somebody who cares!” the BLU Scout cut in.  
“You--you little hooligans! I’ll call the police! I’LL CALL THE POLICE!”

“So sorry,” the BLU Heavy said. Very conspicuously, he reached out for the BLU Medic, who took his hand. His tone, and the flat glare he was giving her, spoke volumes about how he wasn’t sorry at all. The BLU Medic gave her an icy, annoyed stare.  
Her mouth fell open.

“We were just leaving,” the RED Heavy said. He and the RED Medic were already arm-in-arm.  
The RED Scout was the last to the door. As a parting shot, he turned around and said,  
“Yeah, an’ I couldn’t find the crapper in your stupid store, so I took a shit in Booth 42, Section Salmon!” he said.  
The cantankerous old witch actually SCREAMED. 

He ducked around the door, hearing a muffled thump. Maybe she’d thrown something. Maybe she’d fainted and fallen off her harpy-perch onto the floor. He didn’t care.  
He jogged a few steps to catch up with the rest of the guys.

~

“Ugh! What a bitch! I can’t believe you guys gave her money!” the BLU Scout snapped.  
“No, we didn’t,” the BLU Spy said.  
“Or, at least, whatever he spent, we took back.” the RED said.  
The BLU tapped ash off the end of his cigarette. “And then some.”

He opened his suit coat. Hanging from several internal pockets there were dozens of chains--gold and silver--along with strands of pearls, gleaming ash-gray, cream-colored and moon-white.

The RED Spy made an appreciative noise, and then stuck his hands into his pockets. When he pulled them back out, his fingers were glittering with rings, gemstones flashing in the afternoon sun.  
“What the--is--is THAT what the two of you went off to do, after you abandoned me in that roomful of broken musical instruments?” the RED Sniper demanded.  
The BLU Spy shrugged a little. “It was nothing personal.”

The RED Spy amended, “It was an accident. We could not find you after we split.”  
The RED Scout finally caught up with them, and immediately noticed the loot the two Spies had.  
“HOLY SHIT!” the RED Scout crowed.

“Is that real gold? Can I have one’a those?” the BLU Scout asked. He was reaching for the Spy’s hand when the older man slapped his fingers away.  
“Oui. And non,” the RED Spy said. “These are going to be gifts.”  
“How many pieces did you get?” the BLU asked.

The RED shrugged, and counted. “Ehn. Twenty-four.”  
The BLU nodded and switched his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other one-handed, while looking down at the chains in his pockets. 

“Ah! I have twenty-seven. I believe, mon ami, that I am the victor here.”  
“...I like to think we all learned somethin’ about the value of teamwork,” the RED Engineer said. “But, given how we all got split up and ended up more lost than a bunch of jackrabbits in coyote country, I’m not sure that applies.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is fluff. You might as well liquefy cotton candy and inject it directly into one of your veins. I don't actually think anyone is reading these, so I suppose i can ramble as much as i like!


	5. Where Do We Begin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An exploration of Tavish and Jane's relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> contains mention of period-specific, period-typical racism.

Tavish announced that he was there by lighting a match--crisp, hard crack of sound so stark that Jane started.  
His face washed into stark relief in the yellow light, squinting around into the darkness.  
“Tavish,” he whispered. “I...didn’t think you’d come...”  
“Shhh,” Tavish said. He blew out the match. 

In the warm sulphur-and-pine smelling darkness, his hands brushed Jane’s arms, pulled him closer. Jane let himself be pulled closer, til he was pressed flush against Tavish, could feel the other man’s breath on his cheek. He slid his arms around Tavish’s waist and let his head fall forward, his forehead on Tavish’s shoulder.

“Did anyone catch you slipping away?” Tavish murmured, against his scalp.  
Jane shook his head, made a negative noise.  
“Good. No one saw me slip away, either,” he said, his voice tilting towards laughter. “So we have all day to ourselves!” 

~

Sawmill was full of odd abandoned places--basements, shacks, outbuildings and all manner of random attic rooms imaginable. It had obviously been a legitimate logging operation before RED--and BLU--had bought it out to do absolutely nothing useful with the land or the property.

Their favorite meeting place at this base was one such room--the attic of one of the disused barns, reachable only by ladder, through a room with a broken door and a collapsed floor that gave way to a black sinkhole deep as only the devil himself knew. Once, the first time they’d found the place, he’d dropped a bit of rusted metal in and stood with a hand cupped around his ear, counting and listening for the splash. After ten seconds, there it was, faint and muffled.  
He’d given Jane a look.

“Best not to get too close to the edge,” he’d said. He’d offered Jane his hand, and hand-in-hand they’d plastered themselves against the wall and shimmied sideways down the two-foot margin of remaining floorboards attached to it. Mercifully, the attic was not directly over the pit; it was in another attached building, to the east of the one with the caved-in floor. These were abandoned, and apparently had been boarded up, forgotten about, and left to the elements. 

~

Everything felt new, when he was with Jane. Every day was another opportunity for some bizarre fun adventure--treasure hunts where, no matter what they found at the end, the adventure was what they’d wanted to savor. 

It felt that way now, he thought, his hands tingling as he struck another match. This time he touched it to the wick of an old hurricant lantern, and then carefully turned the wick up.   
The attic sprang into view, yellow light washing back to the walls. 

It was before dawn, the sky outside still dark. Even so, the attic’s lone window--a triangle of dust-smudged glass panes set in an eastward-facing wall--was covered with a flap of old brown tarp, as a precaution against anyone seeing the lantern’s light. 

The attic contained a few empty wooden crates, a handful of old, battered furniture--a plain wooden table with a badly-scratched top, a few incredibly rickety wooden chairs-- some more tarp, and nothing else. Tavish had deemed the floor solid enough--though old and prone to creaking--and the roof was still snug enough that it did not leak. 

Tavish set the lantern on the table and Jane ran and got another tarp, rolled it out in a corner by the window, on a patch of relatively dust-free floor. He followed the tarp immediately by a dense olive-drab military surplus blanket. 

They both plopped down on the floor in the corner like teenagers, cross-legged and hiding in someone’s parents’ basement with contraband dirty magazines or cigarettes. That was how conspiratorial the air felt, the atmosphere static with suppressed excitement.

Not that Tavish had known how that felt. He’d been shunted from school to school by a string of administrators, headmistresses, and headmasters, none of whom had wanted a known arsonist enrolled at their school. 

And by the time his parents had come for him, he’d been crushed into far too obedient a boy to sneak anyone into their house--platonic friend or otherwise. There had always been something to do. His father was forever away on jobs, and his mother needed constant help, her final run-in with explosives having left her with a bad case of palsy, as well as permanently blind.  
Tavish realized he’d been sitting motionless for almost a solid minute.  
Jane was looking up at him, eager and curious. 

He reached over and carefully pulled his bulging rucksack into his lap.  
“Guess what I made us for lunch,” Tavish said.  
Jane’s face lit up. “Is it the stew?” he asked.  
He scooted closer, his hands reaching towards Tavish in excitement. “IS IT THE STEW!?”

Tavish very methodically pulled a large, dented rectangular tin out of the rucksack he’d been carrying, and took off the lid.

There were six biscuits inside, golden-brown on top, and sliced in half horizontally, with a piece of ham, a bit of lettuce, and some melted cheddar sandwiched between the top and bottom.  
“Aww,” Jane said, disappointed.  
Tavish made a prim face and pulled out a second tin.

Jane leaned forward, expectant, until Tavish popped the lid off this one to reveal four scones, lemon-yellow and flecked with poppyseeds. Their tops were dusted with a fine layer of powdered sugar.

“Ohh,” Jane said. He went to reach for a scone just as Tavish was reaching into the rucksack again, and earned a swat on the hand for it.  
“You wait, ye great food-thievin’ Yank! I dinnae go to all this trouble to get fresh beef--out HERE, in the middle of the bloody wilderness--for ye to go spoilin’ lunch by eatin’ dessert first!”  
“IT *IS* THE STEW!” Jane said, and tackled the other man gleefully. 

Tavish went over with a shout of laughter and let Jane roll him on the floor--mercifully away from their food--while alternately kissing him and trying to put him into wrestling holds. 

The stew was chunks of beef roasted and then slow-boiled to melting tenderness, in rich spicy broth. He wasn’t a fan of cutting vegetables into fussy small pieces, so there were biggish chunks of tangy-sweet carrots, wedges of onion cooked transparent and mellow, small whole new potatoes with skin that burst between the teeth, and gave way to floury soft insides like clouds, and little barley pearls to round everything off.   
He’d brought two thermoses full, knowing Jane loved the stew probably as much as he loved every other food he’d ever eaten, combined. 

~

The first time, they met entirely by accident. After an explosives expo in New Mexico--which Tavish had left early in disgust, because of how many of the damned Americans kept giving him sideways looks, and if one more swaggering security guard with aviators and a sunburnt neck called him ‘boy’ and demanded to know where he was going, he was going to go to his (very expensive) car, fetch one of his (priceless antique) swords, and start collecting their heads. 

He was walking to the parking lot, scowling around at everyone he passed, and he was halfway to his car when he came across a man loading what looked like five hundred pounds of ballistic SOMETHIGN into the back of a battered old military-issue Jeep.  
He had a box that was broader across than he was, which he was trying--and failing--to cram into the Jeep’s vestigial trunk.

The third time the big box--which was wood-plank, unlabeled, with hay sticking out between slats--had slid back out of the trunk, the man nearly dropped it on his own feet, and Tavish sighed and walked over to him.  
“You, ah, look like you could use some help there,” Tavish had said.

The memory was clear as a snapshot; Jane--then, just a man in a gray t-shirt with chevrons of sweat stretching down the back and front, and denim jeans washed out to the palest blue--had pivoted on one foot and given him a hard, shrewd look from under the brim of the baseball cap he was wearing. He’d pulled it forward and so low that the band covered his eyebrows; his eyes were in a bow of shadow beneath the bill.

“You are the FIRST person ALL DAY to show any real American HOSPITALITY,” the man had said. Well--half-barked; the volume would have bothered Tavish, if loud noises had bothered him at all anymore. The other man had smirked. “And from the sound of things, you aren’t even an American!”  
Tavish had snorted--not quite a laugh. “I haven’t been on the receiving end of much American hospitality myself, today.”

“A damn shame! Americans coming together at an explosives expo--what oughtta be the most All-American type of get-together there is--outside of Fourth of July barbecues, I mean--and nobody can even show a tourist a good time!”  
The way he’d overpronounced the word ‘July’--breaking it into ‘Joo-Lye’--had made Tavish chuckle again.   
“So, do ye want a hand with that, or what?”  
“Step right up, be my guest,” the American had said. 

They’d both been puffing and blowing like a pair oxen who’d spent all day under the yoke by the time the box was in the Jeep’s trunk.   
Tavish clapped dust from his hands and flexed his fingers, feeling for splinters, pleased not to notice any stinging.   
“Not bad, for a tourist.” The other man had said.

Tavish had snorted again, shaking his head. “If I were a tourist, this backwater claptrap is the last place I’d come. There’s that other big show in San Francisco, and if it weren’t for business, I’d’ve gone there, if you want to know.”  
The other man had laughed. “That Golden Gate Bomb-con is nothing but a fence for fireworks dealers to hawk their sparklers and little pop-rocks. You didn’t miss anything.”  
“Oh! So you’ve been?” Tavish was pleasantly surprised.

“Every year, like clockwork,” the other man said. “It’s getting to be a bigger letdown every time. Did you know, they used to let you test the wares before you bought ‘em?”  
“Yer joshin’ me!” Tavish had said. A pleasant conversation wiht a stranger--one of the first of a very few he’d had in the whole godforsaken country. He’d been almost embarrassed at how much he wanted to talk--just to talk to someone who understood what he meant, who didn’t sneer and spit or insult him before he could even open his mouth.

“Nope! Used to aim ‘em out over the water. Unfortunately for EVERYONE, they do NOT anymore. Now it’s all button-down and boring! They kept getting complaints about the ‘noise issue’. And all those day-trippers, whining about bomb fragments falling into their picnic lunches. As if it were POSSIBLE to have good, clean American pyrotechnic fun NEATLY or QUIETLY!”

Tavish gave him an incredulous look and actually burst into laughter.   
“All right, good joke, mate,” Tavish had said.

“I am serious! ...And that only happened to one party of day-trippers. And the fragment was ONLY about the size of a small dog...Still! You wouldn’t BELIEVE the show!” he paused, then gave Tavish another studying look. “But you wouldn’t be interested in shows anyway, would you? After all, you aren’t a tourist,” he said. The last sentence spoken like it was a challenge.

“Well, now, it just depends on the type of the show,” Tavish had said.   
And they had mirrored each other’s crooked smirks.   
The other man dropped one hand on top of the crate with a thump, and Tavish blinked and looked down at it.  
“What did ye buy, anyway? If ye don’t mind my asking,” Tavish had said.  
“Just a few things,” the other man had said, shrugging. “To make grenades. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

He popped the lid off of one of the smaller boxes--a little square one, this one apparently full of crinkled cardboard shavings. Tavish watched him sift through the shavings, and come back up with a pair of matte-gray ovoids, the size of goose eggs--old-fashioned grenade casings, circa 1946. 

The way he’d handled the empty casings, like they were new-laid eggs or Christmas oranges, had caught Tavish’s eye and held it.  
“No,” he’d said. “No, I suppose they don’t.”

~

Their first few encounters like this--on-base or off, whether or not they were working--had been rushed, hasty affairs. You didn’t pass up a quick fuck with another attractive, willing man, because for men like them, encounters were few and far between.   
For his part, Tavish knew that on several levels he was playing with fire. 

He didn’t have the benefit of even being on his native soil; and Americans, for all their talk of liberty and equality, were some of the most vicious people he’d ever had to deal with.

Everything, everything was delicate as spun glass--he was not sentimental enough, at first, to call what they’d had a relationship. Jane was a friend. A friend who he’d seen naked more times than he had fingers and toes, who he occasionally jerked off in the shower in the morning, after fucking the man’s mouth all night. 

It made his insides feel hot and tight. He’d never had anything with anyone that lasted longer than a night, and he’d tried to convince himself to be content with that--content with anonymous smiling women (all of them charmed by his accent, the white women especially eager to see what he had in his pants, all of them always pleased afterwards--and none ever returning) and their rarer counterparts, the men, who came and went like specters from wet dreams.

Jane, though--Jane was the phantom who would reappear, looking just a little sadder, every few months. After awhile, every few weeks. After another while, ever handful of days, they would run across each other.   
He wondered, was the American looking for Tavish, or was Tavish looking for HIM?  
It didn’t seem to matter. They collided again and again. 

He would see him out of the corners of his eyes--the particular bow-legged walk, barrel chest stuck out and arms swinging at his sides. Or hear a raucous shout in a bar and look over and see him about to throw down with bouncers who were trying to throw him out.   
They’d fought so many barroom brawls together already that they were a blur.   
Under all this, the lasting, nagging terror that some awful event was going to come and ruin everything--the other shoe was going to drop.

He hoped it was something as mild as Jane’s wife--if he was married--finally catching them.   
Anything was preferable to what he knew they did to men like them--and to black men, for so much as not taking off their hats fast enough.   
For daring to look back into their eyes. 

But if there was any enmity from Jane, he thought, he would have seen it already. They killed each other on a relatively regular basis. And while he waited with baited breath for the inevitable awful word to pass the other man’s lips--on the battlefield, even--it never did. What a perverse relief it would have been, then, to finally have it out--to beat the tar out of the other man in public, to be the one to walk away, to dare ANYONE to stop or question him.  
He was spared needing that relief. 

~

The tradeoff was that he started to want to be more serious. Almost immediately, phone calls from piss-reeking public phonebooths, to arrange clandestine overnight fucks in seedy no-name motels, stopped being enough. 

He wanted more--wanted the whole deal, nice dinners, someplace pleasant to walk for a bit, then a lavish room in an even bigger hotel, with a view of something worth looking at. (He had a particularly absurd fantasy of just dropping everything, leaving Reliable Excavation Demolition and just asking Jane to leave the bastards at the Builders’ League, and them living together in his mansion in New Mexico. It was remote enough; his closest neighbor lived a mile and a half down the road. Or, they could go back to Scotland; he could scare off the tourism committees he’d given license to guide tours through Degroot Keep, and they could live there--quite literally, like kings.)

No; now, after a lifetime of duty--to his teachers, then to his parents, then only to his mother, and finally to Reliable Excavation, he wanted to do something nice only for himself.

So he’d arranged to have a private phone line installed into his room at the base.   
Everything had been magic for that first week--after-work phone calls with Jane, trying to tamp down the branching feeling of joy at the mere sound of the man’s voice down the line. They talked about nothing in particular, which he was fast realizing were the best types of phone conversations to have with the person you were in love with.

And stranger things had happened in the world, he reasoned. A wizard had stolen his eye; could he really not find happiness?

~

“Yo, how come Demo gets his own private phone, huh? An’ I can’t get one?” the Scout had demanded. He’d been leaning forward in his chair, hands on his knees and his elbows up. Everything about his posture was a challenge.

Tavish had blanched inwardly, but continued dredging shreds pf chicken up from the bottom of his bowl. He did not acknowledge the Scout’s complaint at all.  
Everyone else at the table--everyone with SENSE, that is--pretended to be very engrossed with their food, or whatever else they had brought to the table with them.

“Uh, HELLO?” the Scoud had said again, “I’m freakin’ talkin’ here!”  
“Because,” the Spy had said, flatly, “The Demoman has a sick, blind mother.”  
He remembered the Scout making a face. “Oh, sure. I buy that. I-- _I_ could have a sick mother! You don’t know my ma ain’t sick and don’t need to call me! --Er, need me to call her!”

“Scout, you hear from your mother twice a year. She sends you a Christmas card and a birthday card. You respond anywhere from a week to a month late, you write your replies on notebook paper and in pencil, and post them in envelopes stolen from the Engineer, with stamps stolen from the Sniper. It is a wonder she bothers to contact you at all,” the Spy had said. 

And while the Scout had sputtered something about the Spy invading his personal space and privacy, the older man continued, “The Demoman at least has the decency to contact his loved ones with something resembling frequency.”  
Tavish remembered feeling cold stabs of nervousness up his back and in his armpits. He looked up at the Spy, then, and wished he hadn’t.  
The Frenchman’s meaningful look froze him to the bone.

(Later, in a dark hallway in a secluded part of the base, an invisible man tapped him on the shoulder, before gently closing an invisible hand over his arm.  
“I do not know what you think you are doing,” the Spy had said. “But you had better be more careful. You should have at least as much sense as the jar-man; at least he converses with HIS personal contacts via payphone.”  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tavish had said, as coldly as he could.  
But he was shaking. He stood there shuddering like a leaf on a tree as it was being felled, as he listened to the soft, soft footfalls of the invisible man walking away.)

~

While they lay there it began to rain--a soft pattering shower at first, ticking on the old wood roof in a metronymic rhythm of white noise. Then intermittent patters, broken into waves.  
“’S’windy,” Tavish murmured.   
Jane shifted beside him, grunted a pleased, “Uh huh.”   
“S’nice...with the rain...” he continued.

Talking was a huge effort. Everything was a huge effort, actually, besides laying here with Jane, where they very distinctly were not supposed to be.   
Yawning, he reached up and gently twitched the window tarp aside, revealing a sliver of a view of the outside world.

Everything seemed to distant, now that he could see over the fences--past the barbed-wire, past the barren perimeter where anything resembling anything alive had been hacked down. 

There was only the great forest--still, expansive, gray-green in the hazy dim light.  
He wondered what time it was. But his watch was in his bag, and he felt less inclined to get up and get his bag than he did to think about anything.   
“Wish it...could go on forever...” he said, at last.

Jane shifted next to him, and Tavish turned his head.   
Their faces were inches apart, both of them half-asleep. One--or both--of them scooted towards one another until their foreheads bumped.  
Jane’s rare genuine smile; Tavish laughed, kissed his lips, half-rolled onto his side so he could rub the puppy-soft fuzz at the top of Jane’s head. 

“I love you,” he muttered, his nose pressed hard to the crown of the other man’s head.  
Jane’s response was to squeeze him tighter around the waist, to mumble, muffled by the front of his shirt, “I love you, too.”


	6. The Clothes Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How the Scout deals with homesickness.

The Scout hadn't realized, before, how much having native turf meant to him.

He missed knowing, with absolute certainty, that there was a panel of floorboards in the hall closet that could be picked up, and there was a secret little space that was just the right size for stashing a box of comics or baseball cards or--jeeze, you had to be careful--nudie mags; that the third step to the door of Levinsky's Deli was rickety, and if you weren't careful you'd catch your toes on the loose boards; that if you were trying to sneak back into their building, say, through a window, then you'd better leave the fire escape stairs down, because they screeched like a bunch of alleycats dying in a blender if you tried to let them down from the street. 

And then he joined the private war between RED and BLU. He'd never traveled so much in his life; moving constantly was really neat, at first. If he hated a base, he knew, he'd be there for a month, maybe three, tops, and then it'd be over, and they might not go back there until the next year--if EVER. 

But...it also meant that if he liked a base...they were only there for a month, maybe three, tops, and then it felt like he was being ripped off his feet when they left, and he could never explain why he'd get so quiet and have to go be by himself on the train, while the rest of the guys sat around talking about their next base, their next missions. 

Like--like how, in Badlands, he'd find an excuse to be outside or by a window when the sun was going down because (though he'd never admit it to anyone) the sky and the rock formations were really pretty, all gold and pink and ultramarine blue washed with the fading sunlight; or how, in Gold Rush, he'd run around after matches picking up lost hats and putting them on all the cactuses. 

Sunsets there were beautiful, too, the sky turning burnt-orange, then brilliant red, with gold streaks and clouds like strands of molten silver. The hills turned red-purple, then violet, then black-brown.

He'd begged Medic to borrow his camera and had tried to snap a couple of pictures, once, but it wasn't the same in black and white, and everything was too flat.  
So he just carried the feeling around, the sensations of loss growing with every base they left.

~

It happened on accident, honestly.  
It was their last day at Sawmill.   
He didn't even LIKE Sawmill, but, like, a lot of important things had happened there. 

The washroom was usually cluttered with everyone's stuff, which they'd toss into their respective hampers until Friday night or Satudray morning, which was their official-unofficial-no-really-wash-your-clothes-now day. 

The shirt smelled like the Engineer--the pale, dry smell of blueprint chalk, mixed with grease and ink and sweat. He shot a nervous glance at the door before picking it up and pressing it more closely to his nose.

He took a deeper breath, and it was like--it was like that last day, finishing the first book Engie had lent him, the older man's smile when he offered to let him read any books he wanted, whenever he asked--  
Goosebumps ran all down his arms. He felt this weird warm feeling spread through his chest.

He glanced around again, and started to feel weird. He put the shirt down and went back to stuffing his laundry into one of the big washing-machines, telling himself he was being weird, but every time he ducked his head, he could smell the other man. It was like he was in the room with him.

The Scout darted furtive glances around before snatching the shirt and stuffing it into the same pillowcase where he'd stashed his own clean laundry, and then striding out of the washroom, whistling like nothing was up.

~

The only things he could get from the Spy were a pair of socks--really nice socks, almost as fine and flimsy as his mom's stockings. One of them was practically shredded, and the other had holes in the toes. 

He figured Spy wouldn't miss them, and stuffed them into one of his pockets without thinking.

~

"Where the hell is me damned shirt?" the Sniper was asking.  
"Beggin' your pardon, Sniper, but which shirt would that be?" the Engineer asked.  
"Me--me good button-up! The one wiv silvery little buttons," the Sniper said.  
The Scout froze, feeling cold nervousness start to run up and down his spine like rats' feet. The shirt, he'd thought; the one that had been so, so soft, and the blue material had had the barest sheen to it. And it had had silvery little metal buttons all down the front, and on the cuffs. 

"The chambray one," the Spy said. "I was wondering why you stopped wearing it. I figured you must have stained it with blood while cleaning something you killed..."  
"I'm an OUTDOORSMAN, not an idiot--why would I wear one of my good shirts while skinnin' or cleanin' somethin'? It's gone missin'!"

~

He lay there in his bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about

~ 

He went tearing around the corner, howling with laughter, and skidded a moment on the rug outside the Medic's door. His arms flew wide, and one of the long hanging sleeves caught on the doorknob. 

For a split second he felt air underneath him all down his back, and then he was lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling and the exposed pipes that carried the wiring through the base.

"Mein gott! What was that NOISE?" the Medic asked, pushing his door open.  
"Ow," the Scout gasped. The wind had been completely knocked out of him, and he rolled over, huffing, his eyes starting to water as he forced himself to breathe.

"Is that Herr Heavy's missing jumper?" the Medic asked, his face like a thundercloud.  
His voice was doing that dipping-really-low thing that teachers' voices did when you fucked up REALLY bad and they were about to let you have it, and the Scout started to stammer something, backing away, but on the third step, when he was pivoting to run, he ran smack into the Heavy.

"Eh," the Heavy said. "I have many sweaters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think i saw something about the Scout stealing and hoarding other teammates' clothes on the Ask Scout tumblr, and it grew from there.   
> anyway. i hope you liked it.


	7. Gnossienne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Demoman only played that song when something was gravely, gravely wrong. 
> 
>  
> 
> Or: a very short thing about Tavish and a piano.

It was creepy enough--the old Red Manor. Creepy enough that it was abandoned, that the floors were falling in, that there were THINGS living under the floorboards, and that, for some reason, they had to guard the damn place from the BLUs.

It was all creepy enough without the piano music, warped and out-of-tune, that would go ringing through the halls, faint in the night. And always the same song.  
The music was keeping the Scout up.

~

“He’s doin’ it again,” the Scout whispered, freaked out. His eyes were wide and his lips trembled.

“Who is doing what?” the Spy asked, somewhat archly. He was making himself a sandwich, fussing over the lettuce the way some people only fussed over their newborn children’s diapers. 

“Demo,” the Scout continued, whispering. “He’s playin’ the old busted piano again.”  
“So?” the Spy asked. “This is not terribly uncommon, Scout. Some of us DO have talents that extend farther than whatever skill the company happened to hire us for.”  
He was not going to humor the boy about this one. If the poor Scotsman wanted to drink himself into oblivion and then go bang away at the old wreck of a piano they’d found in a back room, that was his privilege. 

There was also the fact that he played rather well, and the Spy was immensely fond of the waltzes and calliope tunes he would sometimes play. He would never tell the SCOUT this, of course. The Demoman he MIGHT tell, he thought, when he wanted a favor and had a bottle of good whiskey to exchange.  
“No, I mean...he’s. He’s playing IT again. The song.”  
The Spy froze, his hand midway down in its descent towards his sandwich. 

~

Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 was groaning through the hallways, every note distorted and wrong.   
The Spy knew the piano hadn’t been tuned in years--or decades, more likely. This, coupled with the fact that the pianist was almost certainly drunk, did nothing for the song but to make it even more dolorous.  
The sound became more forceful, loping sounds hard then soft then hard again. The Scotsman was wringing everything he could out of the battered old instrument.

The Demoman only played that song when something was gravely, gravely wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> brevity?


	8. Broken Bridges

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Scout comes home from a furlough with a photograph. It is dog-eared and ratty and fragile, and the man in it bears a suspicious resemblance to the Scout.
> 
> The problem is, he's never met the guy. He doesn't even know his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this in 2010! Yes, my backlog of unpublished, unfinished fics is that long, and longer! This still isn't finished, either. Ahh. Anyway, I dusted it off and cleaned it up a bit, so I hope you enjoy reading it. :)

"Who is this?" the Engineer murmured. "Looks like the Scout..."  
"It ain't ME!" the Scout shouted, and was promptly shushed into silence by the others.  
"Calm down, boy, you ain't gotta holler our ears off!" the Engineer took off his hardhat and raised his goggles off, revealing paler circles of skin around his eyes.  
"Jesus, if it ain't you, it sure is someone who looks jest like ya." 

In the picture, a tall, spare young man stood on a riverbank, in a clearing between several trees. In the background, a long strip of buildings, and to his right, a stone bridge with light-posts on it. He had the Scout's gangling frame, his height--and from what they could see of his face, strikingly similar features. A sliver of his face--including his eyes--was obscured in the shadow of the hand he had raised to shield his eyes, however, and there were no other identifying features on him.

"Who do ya think it might be, Medic?" the Engineer asked, and the Medic adjusted his glasses and reached to accept the photograph from the man's outstretched hand. His face was a mask of empirical distaste as he scrutinized it a moment, before turning it over and putting it back down on the table, facing the Scout.  
"That's not the Scout; it could not have been. He was not even born when those buildings in the background were destroyed," the Medic said coolly.

The Engineer regarded the German man with one raised eyebrow, and the Heavy stared at him with such an expression of loaded, guarded surprise that the others, including the Demoman, waited for something else to happen. but when the big Russian said nothing, the Engineer continued.  
"And...where would that be, doc?"

"In France. Those buildings and that bridge you see were destroyed when the German army struck back at the French resistance."  
Everyone stared, agog and somewhat surprised; the Scout continued to stare at the picture, as if transfixed.  
"So...so who do you think this guy is?"  
The Medic shrugged. "I have no idea."

He stood up, jerked the bottom of his shirt to snap the wrinkles out, and left the rec room.  
A moment later the Scout snatched the picture from the Demoman, who had just picked it up, against the protests of the entire group, took off after him.

The Scout caught up with him outside of the building, kicking up sprays of tawny pebbles as he slid to a stop behind the older man.

"Hey! Hey, doc...I gotta know, man, you gotta tell me. How come you know all that stuff about...about that guy in that picture? Did you know him or something?"  
And there was something in the desperate, searching earnestness--so unlike the boy's usual brashness--that the Medic sighed and relaxed his rigid posture the tiniest bit.  
"Nein, Scout. I have never met the man. And I never said anything about him; I mentioned that I was somewhat familiar with the area where the picture was taken. That is all."  
"But...but…! How come you knew it was in France and all that? Who IS he?"

The Medic shifted slightly on his feet, and seemed about to shrug—then pinned the young man with a steely look. "You have never met your father, have you, Scout?"  
The boy had taken his hat off and was wringing it between his hands nervously, glancing around. He muttered, "No, I ain't never met the guy, okay? He left my Ma before I was born. None’a my brothers knew anything about him, either, but at least some of them know who their dads are. My ma...she’s...she gets...real sad, whenever I ask about him, so I can’t...” He continued, more loudly, “Please, doc, if you know anything, you gotta tell me." the boy was looking at the Medic with desperate, pleading eyes.  
The Medic glanced around quickly, then murmured, "If you want to know anything in-depth, come to my office tonight after the battle."  
The Scout watched him go, half-crushed and half-confused, wondering why, exactly, everyone always whispered whenever they were outside.

“I have not told this to anyone, and the only reason I am telling you is because they will assume that I am lying to humor you. Rest assured that I am not.”  
The woman’s voice on the scratchy record dipped low, and the Medic indicated a chair; while the Scout sank down into it, the older man crossed around behind him to check the door.  
The Scout watched him, shifting slightly, and when the Medic came back around and sat down behind the desk, he held out his hand, offering the photograph.  
“So who is this guy?”  
The Medic sighed. “I did not call you here to tell you who that is or is not. I will tell you what I know about the location. From there, you must put your own pieces together.”

The place is a neighborhood in Paris that is not there anymore.  
In better days, when I was a boy, we would go on day-trips to the city, and sometimes stop for lunch along that bank, with the famous bridges in view.  
When the man in that picture posed there, it was the twilight yeas of those bridges. No one could have known how the war would destroy that river, ruin its banks. And the bridges, Scout, you know they are not there anymore, do you not? The place you are looking for no longer exists. As for the man? He might have been a French soldier, on his leave, before being sent to die in the forests to the north. Maybe he was a resistance fighter caught in the last, vicious wave of fighting in Paris. Maybe it was before any of that, and he is simply from a time and place gone by. Either way, it is unwise to hope that he survived the war; the years afterwards were grim even for the victors. At the oldest, this picture is dated sometime in the mid ‘thirties, so even if you found him he might not be who you are looking for—might be a bitter old man who wants nothing to do with you.  
The suburbs, the little areas around Paris, were in ruins. Parts of the city itself burned for days. The corpses of resistance fighters were left in the streets as a lesson to anyone foolish enough to speak out.  
I know, Scout, because I was there and I saw it happen. It might be wise to avoid seeking out this man, whoever he is, because you might bring up memories he would rather not relive.

When the Medic finished talking, the Scout shifted in the chair and asked, quietly, “So you think I shouldn’t look for him?”

~

The Scout caught up with the Spy in the hallway the next afternoon, after spending a night jerking awake every time he drifted off, and doing poorly in the morning’s battle. He had thought long and hard about this; he couldn’t stand Spy, but he was the only other person who would know anything. 

The Spy’s reaction to the brief explanation of the picture’s significance was his customary bored stare.  
The Scout rubbed his neck and finished, “An’ I just figured, well, you’re smart an’ shit, why shouldn’t I ask you?”  
He held out the picture.

The BLU Spy accepted the photograph, pinching one corner between thumb and index of the same hand he held the cigarette with; he looked down at it, and anyone but the Scout would have noticed the almost imperceptible widening of his eyes, the suddenness with which he switched the cigarette to the opposite hand.

“Who is zis? Some brozzer of yours who ‘as gone missing in your asinine country’s most recent armed farce?”  
The Scout tensed all over, his hands clenching into fists. “No way! None’a my brothers was stupid enough to get caught up in that shit. Anyway I dunno who he is, that’s why I’m asking YOU.” 

The Spy looked from the face of the young man in the photograph, to the Scout’s face and back again, and tossed the picture down on the table with affected carelessness.  
His stare as the boy pocketed the picture went unnoticed; the Scout was too busy trying to find something, patting his pockets.  
Finally he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and offered them to the Spy.  
“Medic says you love these but you can’t find ‘em anywhere in America.”

The Spy’s eyes were instantly riveted to the pack of German cigarettes, which the Scout held out almost carelessly.  
“Matter of fact,” the boy continued, “Medic says they don’t even make this brand anymore, and the only reason I know you like ‘em is ‘cause they have that little green line around ‘em that other kinds don’t have. Anyway it’s not like I’m gonna smoke ‘em, but if you tell me who the guy is, I might could decide to give ‘em to you.”

The Spy paused for a moment, eyes narrowed, before he snorted through his nose.  
“You are bribing me for information…wiz a pack of twenty-year-old cigarettes?”  
The Scout looked suddenly embarrassed, and began to put them back into his pocket. “God, man, if you didn’t want ‘em, you could’a just said. Christ, I’ll just go ask the Heavy. At least HE won’t be a complete dick about this.”

“Sometimes, I marvel at your incredible stupidity, Scout,” the BLU Spy said conversationally.  
“Listen, ya fuckin’ prick, you ain’t gotta follow me around n’ shit, if you want the cigarettes just gimme a buck an’ I’ll let you have ‘em!”  
“You sell yourself so short, garcon, you have no idea. But zat is not my point.”  
The Scout glared at him.


	9. untitled thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is _really_ behind the war between Reliable Excavation Demolition and the Builder's League United?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this in 2010 too! ...Yeah, this is abandoned. I'm most likely not going to finish this, just because nowadays I find that i don't have the energy to do grimdark things as much anymore. :( Still, i hope you enjoy reading what i jotted down. 
> 
> There was this huge trend for Evil Engineer a few years back, and i sort of let the thought stew in my mind until...this came out. Please note, he's not ACTUALLY evil here...just not sugar-pie-nice like he usually is.

“Far’s they’re concerned, RED ‘n BLU are jest two groups of eccentric rich guys, blowin’ off steam. Weapons development for the military? Please. D’you have any idea how expensive it’d be to build an army’s worth of dispensers? Or the logistical nightmare it’d be to try an’ coordinate, say, eight platoons’ worth of teleporters?” the Engineer’s chuckle was gravelly and low in the dark. “You were here when we first started work on those. You know how long the casualty list was, an’ our teams are only nine-strong.”

“The government knows exactly what’s goin’ on here, and RED ‘n BLU wanta keep it that way. Transparency—at least, to the right parties—makes their job much easier. How d’you think we’ve been able to jest requisition such extensive sections of rail? An’ why do you think it is that RED has been able to jest shift us around to new ‘battlefronts’ whenever they feel like it? Don’t it seem jest a LITTLE odd to you that, for all the fighting we do, we’re always up against the same enemies? I know you’ve been into their bases, probably even gone through all their personal e-ffects. So, Spah,” the Engineer leaned forward, plucked the cigarette from the Spy’s slack lips, and took a drag, “Maybe, before you go tryin’ ta use company secrets fer leverage against the rest of us, or fer blackmail…you oughta stop n’ wonder how much yer teammates already know.”

He tucked the cigarette back into Spy’s mouth, patted him on the shoulder, and then turned to stroll away.

~

“That makes no SENSE,” the Spy snapped. “Then ‘ow do the companies generate MONEY?”  
“I’m shocked, Spah,” the Engineer drawled. “Y’aint figgered out what all the cameras are fer, yet?”  
The Spy was shocked. “Non, I ‘ave NOT! And a part of me doubts zat YOU ‘ave, eizzer!”  
“We’ve been on-base, what, three-odd years now? With weekends for leave, SOMETIMES?”  
“What are you getting at?”  
“How often d’you watch television when you’re at home?”  
“I find it a puerile waste of time and mental resources; I do not even own one.”  
The engineer chuckled again, shaking his head. The sudden realization hit the Spy like a ton of bricks.  
“We…”  
“We’re participants—most of us unwittin’ ones, at that—in Team Fortress the live-broadcast television show.”  
“You cannot be serious. Our WORK—the intelligence—”  
The Engineer broke his statement in half with a bark of derisive laughter. “The intelligence consists entirely of garbage readouts generated by the company computers. Frankly, I’m s’prised you never snuck a peek at any of the briefcases’ contents. Or did you consider it ‘unprofessional’ to look inside?”  
The gobsmacked Spy opened and closed his mouth, wordless and breathless as a landed fish.  
“Of—COURSE I looked over the contents, when given half the chance! I…I thought they were statistics, or—”  
“What? That they were really important? You really thought a Spy with a compromised identity, and with a mile-long record of double-crosses—could get work with any serious company? Or—what about the rest of the team? A washed-up Russian boxer, some punk kid who they probably found on the streets, and a desperate German doctor running from some big secrets? An’ the rest of ‘em?” he snorted again.

~

(later, after the Spy does some investivating)  
there were dark half-circles of sagging skin under the Spy’s eyes—he looked like a man with a bad fever. His suit was disheveled and his tie crumpled; his normally immaculate appearance half-wrecked.  
The Engineer tried not to grin too broadly. “Spah! Come on in!”  
The Engineer’s house was immaculately kept, but also incredibly, almost offensively bland.

“How many of the ozzers know the truth?”  
“The Scout thinks he’s in a paramilitary unit that will eventually line him up with a prime contract for a good baseball team. The Heavy might know the truth, but if he does, I can’t see why he’d care. The Medic has no idea, but’d probably flip his lid if he found out. Pyro, Demo n’ Sniper I’m not sure about.”


	10. Barnblitz Blues (RED Team)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Engineer falls in love with a man who is already in love with someone else.

No one liked Barnblitz. 

The place was a maze of rickety old buildings, the operation having changed hands several times before falling into those of Reliable Excavation Demolition and the Builder’s League United, respectively. And it seems that each new generation of owners had tacked on more buildings, without fully demolishing or retrofitting the old ones: hence the jumble of barns, sheds, and outhouses, crushed together on the packed square of flinty gray soil that was the lot.

On average, it could take anywhere from twelve to approximately twenty-eight minutes to cross the map, from their own doors to those of the Builder’s League base.  
They defended the shambling old ruin as best they could. 

The thin, gritty snow wasn’t even the same crisp white of the alpine splendor of places like Viaduct; nor was it as remote and harsh and still as breathtaking as Coldfront. It was just cold and run-down, squatting in a valley that felt like it was in the visegrip of the surrounding mountains.

He was, of course, aware of the fact that they were there to work and not admire the scenery, but any distraction would have been a welcome one to the constant, tedious stress of guarding against the BLUs and their bombs. 

But when temperatures dropped so low that the grit underfoot developed a brittle, treacherous layer of ice, without even the benefit of additional snowfall, the Announcer called a stalemate; apparently, both sides were suffering more injuries from the environment than they were inflicting on each other. (The Medic, bone-tired of wasting medigun charges on healing frostbitten extremities and bruises, heaved a sigh of relief. The rest of the team, themselves tired of being the ones repeatedly suffering from frostbite, also relaxed visibly.)

The Scout had fractured his ankle, and then his elbow, taking corners too fast; the Sniper came in from a match one day with his hands waxy and stiff as a mannequin’s, and his nose and cheeks burnt reddish from the cold air. The Demoman and Soldier both had long chapped streaks around their eyes--testament to the cold wind slapping them in the face as they blasted themselves around the battlefield. The Heavy, who seemed to be perpetually anticipating such weather, simply piled on more layers of clothing, and suffered no more adverse weather-based ailments than a pair of bruised shins, which he got from misjudging the distance between a step and a crate, off-the-field. 

For his part, the Engineer was glad he was no longer trying to coax his machinery to function in subzero temperatures, praying the accumulated ice wasn’t doing anything too severe inside his sentries, and that the workings inside his dispensers wouldn’t jam or freeze solid adn leave them all helpless. They hadn’t even been there a week and he was already ready to leave.

~

Come the following Monday, the temperatures were still dropping. At midday the air was so cold the sound of someone breaking a stick a hundred meters away was so crisp and loud that it hurt to hear. The night before, the Pyro had begged a carpenter’s plane off the engineer and took to shaving the logs down instead of hacking them into hunks as they usually did. Giving them smaller pieces--but a seemingly more plentiful supply--helped keep them from getting antsy and doing regrettable things to their already-scant furniture--or the wooden buildings everywhere around them.

The Announcer called the end of the match moments before the Scout, his shoes and socks sodden with melted snow, limped into the shack he’d set up his buildings in.  
He only stayed long enough to warm his hands and feet by the dispenser, shucking his now soaked, grayish knuckle bindings in favor of some gauze. The chilblains the boy had made the Engineer wince in sympathy, though within a few moments of proximity to the dispenser they’d disappeared. 

“Thanks, Hardhat,” the young man said, and then walked--WALKED!--back towards the base. If he had a slight limp still, even after the dispenser, the Engineer figured it wasn’t his business to say anything.

Then a different gait over the snow, the footsteps heavy and careful. The Demoman strode into view, shaking lint-gray powdered snow from the folds of his scarf and knocking snow from the heels of his boots on the edge of the step before climbing up.  
“’Ey, Engineer,” he said, and waved a little.  
“Much obliged for that save earlier today,” the Engineer said.

The Demoman smiled a little, shrugging. “Ah, it were nothin’ special. If it weren’t for ye and yer machines, the BLUs would hae overrun us in minutes! Least I could do, brushin’ their Pyro and Heavy back for ye.” 

The Engineer nodded, then, half-hiding his own smile in the fleece-lined collar of his coat. He was glad, for a moment, that the goggles made it impossible to see where he was actually looking.

The Demoman was wearing a densely-cabled knitted sweater and fleece-lined trousers with cargo pockets. The trousers looked too much like pajamas for the Engineer NOT to notice them. Under one arm he carried a clinking, rustling crate, and his stickybomb launcher hung from his other hand. He was humming, quietly, something the Engineer did not recognize, and as he passed the shed where the Engineer’s own workshop was on the way to his own, the Engineer craned his neck to see out the frost-rimed window as he set his stickybomb launcher down--dandling the crate the way some people dandled their infants--and then fishing his keys out of one of the cargo pockets. He spun the keyring around his index finger once, tossed it up, caught it in the same hand.  
The Engineer smiled, just a little, and then felt slightly embarrassed. 

A moment later the Demoman had his workshop door open and was inside. When he closed the old wooden door, the movement dislodged some of the snow from the roof.  
He had, the Engineer thought, and incredible economy of motion--kinetic, jaunty. It was fun just to watch him do perfectly mundane things. He’d seen the Scout do the same trick with his keys a half-dozen times and thought little to nothing of it, and yet now in the Demoman’s hands, it had a new kind of charm.

(In retrospect, he should have thought harder about why, exactly, this was. Not that it would have saved him any pain. Falling in love with someone was a slow, inexorable process, illogical to such a complete degree that he was out of his depth even before he realized the actual degree of his feelings.)

~

It was late when he went in for dinner. Outside in the yard, the lights throwing irregular bluish pools of light at the bases of buildings. Mercifully it was not snowing, but besides the lights it was pitch black; he could see the moon cresting the rooftops of the tallest eastern building. In the cloudless sky, the moon had an ice halo, and the few stars that were visible glittered down coldly as ice crystals on black velvet.  
He snorted a little, and blew into his hands. The cold was making him maudlin. 

Inside the base was several degrees warmer than his workshop, and he quickly shed his gloves and scarf and hardhat, stuffing everything into the cubby in the entryway.  
He could smell burnt bread and a stronger aroma of roasted meat, and even from where he was, he could hear the TV: loud canned laughter and applause: the Scout and Soldier were probably camped out on the couch, watching game shows.  
He smiled a little.

Around a corner the hallway opened into the combined rec-room, where, yes, the Soldier and Scout were sitting on the couch. In one corner, pushed back against a wall, there was a potbellied cast iron stove, with embers glowing a warm low orange behind its grate. Someone had left a pair of sodden boots propped up beside it, and there was a little metal laundry rack jury-rigged from wire hangers standing next to it, currently festooned with dripping socks. 

“Evenin’, boys,” the Engineer said.  
“HELLO, ENGIE!” the Soldier shouted.  
“Hey, Hardhat!” the Scout said, at normal speaking volume, “Wanna watch Jeopardy with us? Heavy was in here earlier but he got mad ‘cause Soldier kept yellin’ so many wrong answers before he could think.”  
“That’s because AMERICAN GAME-SHOWS require SPEED, not ACCURACY!”  
The Scout snorted. “Yeah, sure, man, that must be why why only you got, like, two right so far, ain’t it?”  
“In order to WIN, one must BEAT HIS OPPONENTS TO THE PUNCH!” the Soldier continued.

“Yeah, sure. That must be why you only got, like, three right answers this whole time, huh?” the Scout said, elbowing the Soldier.

 

~

A casual brush past the other man in the hallways left his skin tingling. The sound of his laugh, a joke, a glance, would leave the Engineer with enough material to spin a thousand private scenarios.  
People assumed that because he worked with machines, he was not imaginative.  
He was content to let them think that, for the most part; that he was stolid and uncreative and dull but for his machines, but at night he turned those little encounters over and over in his head until they were as polished as pearls.

His favorite went like this: they were at dinner--a completely normal team dinner. Everyone was getting up to go, taking their plates to drop off in the kitchen, and once everone else had left the dining hall, the Demoman would come to his side, quietly, and speak to him.  
His hand, so warm on Dell’s shoulder he still felt it after he moved it. 

He would lean closer, murmur something in the Engineer’s ear, and then walk past him with a secretive smile. The Engineer felt the heat spreading in his belly.  
But he would make himself wait--until everyone had cleared out of the common areas, until he was sure the Spy wasn’t hiding anywhere, before he went out through a side door and took himself over to the Demoman’s workshed.

He would be sitting in his chair in the far corner, behind his cluttered desk. His heavy vest would be discarded and shirt untucked, showing a delicious sliver of brown skin exposed between the bottom of his red sweater and the white of his undershirt. He would already have himself in hand, the head of his erection peeping up from teh cuff of his fingers, the head a wet, glossy dark pink. But he would pause when he heard the Engineer come in, and then look over at him.

They would watch each other from across the room, heat pouring back and forth between them, before the Engineer would stride over to him.  
(The Engineer finally allowed himself to adjust his erection--only a brief touch; he’d just started, and wasn’t even at the good part yet.)

The other man would beckon him closer, smiling like he had a secret, and when the Engineer got close enough he’d sling an arm over his shoulders, pull him closer. He’d be able to smell the high, acrid smell of the chemicals he used for explosives, the cigarette smoke, and then, underlaid beneath all of that, the warm salt-sweat smell of flesh, the bergamot smell of the pomade he used on his hair, the smell blossoming warm in his nose and the back of his throat.

The Demoman’s hands would be slow but deliberate and sure, and he’d move one up--the Engineer would reach for his hardhat at the same time, but it would come off in teh Demoman’s hand, to be set aside, on top of his folded flak vest. 

He could imagine the slow slide of the man’s hand over his head, the sleek sensation of his palm on his bare scalp. He’d turn his head a tiny degree and nose into the Demoman’s cheek, the edge of his close-trimmed beard bristling gently under his lips. The Demoman would turn his head and meet him, their lips chaste on each others’ at first.  
Then the other man would slide his hand gently round to the back of the Engineer’s head and pull him in, deepening the kiss. 

(The Engineer took a deep breath, and slid his briefs down, finally freeing his cock. By then he was rock-hard and wet, his dick drooling pre-ejaculate in a clear trail on his belly. His mouth was already watering.)

He’d gently fuck his mouth with his tongue, their lips sliding together. He’d undo the Engineer’s fly one-handed, his fingers gentle as he slipped his cock free.  
(He wrapped his own fingers around himself, his hand moving slowly, slowly. His other hand came up and slipped idly along his own lips, his mouth, before pressing down gently. Quiet, he reminded himself, these things had to be done quietly.)

And the Demoman would shush him gently, too, if a gasp or moan escaped him, but it felt like a benediction, to be spoken to this closely, to be close enough to feel his breath as the sibilant sound left his lips.  
His lips, on the Engineer’s temple as he bent his neck, rested his forehead on the Demoman’s shoulder.  
And oh, his hand would be unhurried as a dream, slow fingers gliding up and down his cock in smooth, sure strokes. 

The other was far more intimate: a fantasy of waking up to some cold morning, coccooned together in teh same bed, to have the privilege of rolling over and skimming his han across the other man’s broad, dark chest, over tight curlicues of black chest hair, his fingertips barely skimming his soft nipples. The Demoman would turn, waking, and smile at him, pull him closer for an embrace, a kiss. 

When the Engineer came, he muffled his moan in the sleeve of his nighshirt. 

~

When he was younger, these things hadn’t been thought about, or done.  
This was why his secret hurt like a handful of swallowed needles.  
He had been abruptly made aware of the fact that he was not quite like the other local boys, when at the ripe age of fifteen he saw his first nudie magazine, courtesy of a classmate by the name of Earl Buford. He had been...underwhelmed. The young lady in the book had been a redhead in a translucent canary-yellow slip with a slit on one leg up to _there_ and a flirty smile on her face--well, she’d been attractive, of course. 

She was posing as if leaned comfortably against a wall, one long, shapely leg clad in a black stocking slipped through the slit in the silky yellow cloth. He’d been mostly unimpressed, but the other boys had stared at it with a kind of glossy-eyed hunger. He wound up thinking instead about how, once, at the community pool, he’d jumped off the diving board and opened his eyes under the water, and found himself in a forest of long, muscular, hairy legs, the gentle pressure from the water sculpting the thin jersey material of their swimming shorts into such neat, pert packages around the men’s privates.

~

The yard was quiet, in the heather-gray twilight, the day’s match having ended long ago.  
Outside, the sky was pale, turning purple-black at its eastern edge. All the buildings were washed orange and gold and were almost attractive, in the slanting winter light. 

It would be dark shortly, and already he could see a few fat, fluffy snowflakes coming sifting down. They would probably get another few inches overnight.  
He was still fussing with his sentry, trying to decide if the upgrades he was considering were worth adding the the auto-build template. 

He was also considering, only in the most abstract way, if he ought to go back into the base and eat dinner with the rest of the team, or continue his work and go in after and eat alone.  
Down the way, from the base proper, a billowing plume of gray smoke was rising from a chimney: the Pyro must have lit one of the fireplaces, or else the Spy had lit the one in his smoking room. The others would be nice and warm and just about ready to bed down.  
He thought of his own disused quarters--blueprints tacked up on the walls, the bed made but untouched. 

But he heard a soft noise like distant footsteps. He paused a moment, listening. When he heard nothing else after awhile, he was ready to write it off as just the wind, or some snow falling from a particularly overloaded eave, except next he heard footsteps.  
Someone was hurrying over the snow.  
Through the almost iced-over pane of his workshop’s single window, he saw a familiar figure moving in the fading light. 

It was the Demoman, unarmed, keeping to the edges of the buildings and very nearly in their shadows. The Engineer noticed he was careful to walk in areas where the snow had already been marked up with footprints: he seemed not to want to leave a trail.  
He came around to the central barn and paused uncertainly in a rhombus of sunlight. He was looking for something, his face upturned as if searching the rafters. 

The Engineer caught his breath a little at the other man’s face, so unlike the expression he wore in battle. He looked--earnest, almost panifully so, and very, very young.  
The Engineer raised his hand, placed his naked palm against the cold glass where through he watched the other man walking in the snow.

After a moment the Demoman turned back and went back towards the westernmost building, around a corner to where there as a section of exposed perimeter fence.  
The Engineer flattened himself against the wall inside his workshed to get a better look across the way. He could see, unclearly, into the far corner, a gap perhaps six feet long where there was only chain-link fence between two buildings.

Then, bending a segment of fence around as casually as you would pull back a curtain, there was the BLU Soldier.

“What in the--” he said. He snatched his pistol off his worktable and slapped a clip in, but when he went to look back out the window, what he saw almost made him drop it. 

 

~Two

Cross-team fraternization, while not expressly forbidden, was frowned upon, considered a breach of professional conduct. He was not precisely certain of the terms this functioned under, seeing as how much of the contracts that Reliable Excavation Demolition had set them up with were very deliberately vague in some areas, while being ludicrously specific in others.  
He was fairly certain the Demoman was aware of this.

That was, nevertheless, not stopping him from throwing his arms around, and then sharing a secretive kiss with, the enemy Soldier.  
The BLU Soldier slipped his beanie off, running his hands over the Demoman’s close-cropped hair, his own hands in rough faded fingerless gloves.  
The Engineer’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. 

The Demoman, who had tipped the Soldier’s helmet back to kiss him, took it off completely, enough that the Engineer could see the man’s smiling face over the Demoman’s shoulder. The Demoman ran his thumb over the Soldier’s cheek, brushed fallen snow off the stubble of his buzzed hair. The Soldier pressed his own gloved hand to the Demoman’s, twining their fingers. 

After a moment they put their hats back on and stood a little away from each other, just talking. They never let go of each others’ hands.  
His own pulse was pounding but he felt almost queasy.  
He thought of the beers he’d bought, what a ridiculously simplistic idea that had been: and now, a completely wasted gesture.  
The man already had someone else.

~

The sun was going down behind the mountains mountains, painting the already-beautiful granite faces with October's slanting amber sunlight. The sky overhead was deep cyan, shading towards ultramarine, the clouds purple and washed red and streaked with gold.  
Even to a man with a handful of doctorates who understood, better than most, how light refraction and solar rays worked, it was still an impressive light show.  
It also did nothing to lessen his current mood, which was decidedly depressed.

The Engineer thought about the Demoman's hands, sure and deft as he moved among his instruments, the clean lines of his shoulders leading the curve of his neck into the curve of his skull. His eyelashes, dipping low as he studied whatever was in front of him. 

He thought, obliquely, about how the Demoman probably touched the BLU Soldier--that stupid, brainless, lucky bastard, who was most likely too big of an idiot to realize how brilliant the Demoman was. He wondered how the Demoman looked at the BLU Soldier, what it felt like to be the one under that gaze.

He went to take another swallow of his beer but found it empty. He thumped the bottle down on the countertop, snatched another from the cooler, and ripped the cap off with a wrench, bottle openers being a nicety he hadn’t considered before he started drinking. Now he considered it to be too much of a bother to go inside and get one.

He flicked the crumpled lid away, only for it to be snatched out of thin air by--the Spy, who was there suddenly, appearing with a muted, soft electronic crackle as he dropped cloak.  
"This again? You know, I assure you, drinking yourself into a stupor is not your strong suit."  
"Oh, you go straight to hell, Spy," he muttered, swatting at the air in the Frenchman's direction. 

There was the proverbial knife, twisting between his ribs. Here was the resident Lothario, come to salt the wounds of his completely unrequited--unnoticed, even--affections. 

He only spared the Spy a single, spiteful sidelong glance, and did not move from his seat to make room for the other man. There was an entire mess hall he could have gone to, but instead he came back here to where he had to know the Engineer would be hiding.

The Spy, normally more loquacious than a mynah bird, was completely silent. He stood slightly to the side of the improvised table, what seemed like a respectful distance for anyone else. To someone like the Spy, who valued his personal space the way others did their own oxygen supplies, it was practically a companionable lean against his shoulder.  
“And join you, my friend? I’d much rather not. Come now. When has wallowing gotten anyone anywhere?”

The Engineer decided not to dignify that question with an answer. He took another swallow of beer.  
He heard a soft clinking beside himself and saw that the Spy was--the Spy was rearranging the haphazard bunch of bottles into neat rows. Even through the haze he knew it was for a purpose--the Spy was trying to show him, very unsubtly, that he’d had too much, by showing him exactly how much he’d actually had.

“Wastin’ yer time,” he said, around the mouth of the bottle. “Ain’t done yet, gonna have plenty more ‘fore the night is up.”  
The Spy gave him a pitying look. “Is this how you commonly act? Like a lovelorn boy fresh out of college, crushed because his beloved does not know he exists?”

He hated the way the Spy could read people as plainly as he could read a newspaper, the way the man could instantly be between your skin and thoughts like he belonged there.  
Then he felt a stab of nervousness. If the Spy had noticed, then--  
But he crushed the worry a moment later. It’s just his job, he told himself. His job is to notice things no one else sees.

There was no way the Demoman had noticed anything. He wouldn’t still have been so friendly with him, if he had noticed, would he?

~

All his life he’d worked. Studied hard, at first--then worked. The doctorates came in a blur of paperwork, following up close behind patents, inventions, company this-or-that asking him to come out and help them set up eveyrthing from oil drilling to mining operations, and everything in between. He’d crossed the country a handful of times, but the only thing travel did was leave him thirsty for home, desperate for familiar grit and hot wind, for the horizon going forever. 

And in all that time, a part of him reminded himself, he hadn’t met a single person who’d wanted to stay. 

He was no fool, waiting and being lonely. He’d been to clubs in San Francisco and New York and bars in Austin, and meeting other men was easy enough--if you were careful--and fun, but. Well, the men in San Francisco and New York had all been party animals, and the men in Austin had made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that they weren’t looking for anything serious.

In all that time, he’d managed only three long-term relationships--the latest of which was with a professor of physics who taught at Stanford. Everything had seemed perfect. He’d had a contract with a nuclear power company and was working on projects for them; his physicist had an apartment in the city and he had his own place nearby. They’d spent most of their time at his place; the physicist had used his own apartment almost entirely for storage.

And then one morning, without warning--or without any that HE’D noticed--he woke up and found the other man sitting on his side of teh bed, already dressed. A suitcase, closed and clearly full, was on the bed beside him.  
Then, he’d felt the knives of panic. He’d asked him what was wrong, where he was going.

His physicist had turned to him and pinned him with a terrified look.  
“The head of my department knows. I--he’s--if he tells the dean--”  
And the Engineer, who had grown up in a town in Texas so small they only had three paved streets, understood the bone-deep terror of someone finding out.

He’d felt stupid for thinking the world of academia would have been any different, that a fistful of Ph.Ds with his name on them would amount to any protection.  
His physicist had left. He found out, months later, that the man had hastily married one of his coworkers, a biology professor. He never heard from him again.

The only thing he’d felt was a kind of helpless frustration--the urge to laugh and sob at the same time.  
He’d gotten shit-faced drunk to deal with that loss, too. 

~

“You would feel better, perhaps, if you would share some of those thoughts. They look quite bitter,” the Spy tried again.  
“No thank you,” he muttered. What was that phrase about people not being able to let kicked dogs hide and lick their wounds in peace? Maybe there wasn’t a phrase, and he was running two aphorisms together. He didn’t remember. 

“I must implore you,” the Spy said, his voice dipping. “Think of the brain cells you could save by merely speaking, instead of imbibing.” Sugar-sweet, tainted molasses and poisoned honey. 

“I do not owe you or any other man my entire life story, Spy,” the Engineer said flatly. “And if you’re fishin’ for some sob story, there ain’t one. He’s a damn fine man, and someone else beat me to the punch. There. Now, seein’ as I’ve already said it in the plainest terms possible, there ain’t much ambiguity left. I am a man drinking with a purpose.”

The Spy smiled, then, a small, private expression. “I see I was wrong, at least, to worry you would lose your sense with too much drink.”  
“HE doesn’t,” the Engineer pointed out, still flat and bitter. 

“But he is a man who drinks with a ‘purpose’--as you put it--as well. One he has not fully disclosed, but given the chance, I am not sure he would advise you to follow his particular example for coping.”

He half-turned in the rickety chair, dragging one arm across the uneven wood of the tabletop in the process. He bit back a harsher swear, glanced down and saw he had a series of small scrapes along the underside of his arm. 

“God damn it, Spy, can’t you just...let a man have a bit of private time? Let him grieve for someone he wants and can’t ever have? Can’t ya?”  
Then the Frenchman hesitated, his normally-steely-eyed gaze suddenly somehow open and searching.  
“I could,” he said, “If I thought that was all you would do, instead of something ill-advised.”

They were silent a long moment. The Engineer took another gulp of beer. The Spy shifted slightly where he was. At that point the Engineer started to feel a bit like a heel, but of course there wasn’t a thing he could do--there were no other chairs in the workshop to offer the Spy, and he knew the man would take a bite out of one of the wooden crates before he would risk his suit trousers by sitting on it. 

He snorted, instead, the sudden remorse passing quickly. "’Ill-advised’, my ass. Like what, shoot myself? And wake up in Respawn sick as a dog, feelin’ like a mule kicked me in the head? No, thank you.”

The Spy was silent, thankfully. Before he could speak again, the Engineer started talking, himself.  
“Not like a man like YOU would know what it's like, not gettin' what ya want," he continued, the bottle's mouth pressed to his lip. "Got yer fancy car and your fancy suits. Hell, far's I've heard, you've had--or coulda had--every man in this base."

"That is not true. I assure you," the Spy said, with eyes surprisingly bright, "That I have much, much more experience in the area of disappointed affections than you would expect. In fact, I am not ‘getting what i want’ right now..."  
The Engineer chuckled, low and wet, and then belched.  
The Spy’s only response was to tilt his head slightly, face still carefully blank.

“And just what is that,” the Engineer asked. He kept his voice dull on purpose, hoping in a small, ugly corner of his mind that the Spy would get annoyed with him and leave him be, if only he thought he was drunk enough.  
But when the Spy spoke, his voice was measured and careful. “You are a...teammate of mine.”

You didn’t say friend, the Engineer thought. You hesitated, and you didn’t say friend.  
“Yeah. ‘Zat s’posed t’mean somethin’ when we ain’t on the field?”  
“It means that, in whatever capacity you may say, it is in all of our best interest to worry about YOUR interests.”  
“Listen, Spy, this is real diplomatic of you’n’all, but you ain’t gotta waste time mincin’ words t’tell me you feel sorry for me.”  
A wry look from the other man, then. “If that was all I were trying to say, I would have simply left you a bottle of better alcohol.”

The Engineer looked away from him, then, took a swallow from the bottle and belched again.  
The Spy finally sighed. “You can try to make yourself as repulsive as possible, but that will not be enough to make me leave.”

He DID turn around, then, one hand braced flat against the worktable and the other clenched into a fist on top of his thigh.  
“What do you WANT, Spy?”  
The Spy gave him a placating look before sighing and murmuring, “You have been out here for two days. I want to help you.”

Then the Engineer laughed, his face incredulous, laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe for a moment. When he regained himself the Spy was still standing there, watching him, his face now impassive.  
“Good Lordy, Spy, what in the hell--unless you’re a wizard who c’n concoct some love potions, there ain’t a damn thing you can do to help me.”

The Spy stood there looking--not at the Engineer, he realized. He was staring very carefully at a spot someplace directly in front of his own shoes.  
This passed quickly. A moment later the Spy looked back at his face, sharp-eyed facade back on and firmly in place.

“I see I was wrong in thinking that talking about it might help you to feel better,” he snapped.  
“Yes you were,” the Engineer said, taking another pull on the beer. A feeling of ugly, mean-spirited glee was welling inside his chest.  
“I will be inside. You know where to find me when--or if--you decide to stop trying to pickle your own innards.” he turned and began to leave.

“Spy,” the Engineer called after him.  
The Spy turned mid-step to look back at him.  
“Do NOT tell anybody else.”

The Frenchman did not even justify this with a verbal response; he scoffed, rolled his eyes, and then continued back towards the base, stalking through the dirty snow like an offended cat. 

 

~Three

The next morning, he woke up feeling like he’d eaten a barrel of eels after being hit by a truck.  
Queasiness notwithstanding, his mouth was also dry, and when he sat up--muscles stiff and protesting the kind of treatment no one over thirty should subject themselves to--his stomach clenched tight and hard.  
“Well, hell,” he muttered to himself.

He’d half expected to wake up with a blanket draped over his shoulders, or something of the sort, more evidence of Spy’s mother-henning. When he found himself still wearing nothing but his down vest, with no blanket in sight, he didn’t know whether to feel saddened or relieved.

He stood up gingerly, wincing when his back complained. At least, he thought to himself, the machinery kept the workshop warm: outside, he could see that some time during the night it had snowed again. He was stiff and uncomfortable, sure, but he figured it could have been worse: he might have frozen to death and then awakened in Respawn. They’d been snowed in more than once, and he didn’t relish the thought of being trapped there alone until they realized he was missing and went to check on him, and then spent the additional time shoveling the doorway clear to let him out.  
He thought about the previous night.

It occurred to him that the Spy was the only one who had come to check up on him.  
Then again, he didn’t know what he’d been expecting. The whole point of his useless pining was that no one else noticed or had any idea, except--well, teh Spy. 

The Medic might have come by to offer condolences, had he known, but then what else would he have said? He might have offered (very solicitously, as he always did whenever making a friendly but scientifically and ethically unsound offer) to clone the Demoman for him, but it would have been wasted. The Engineer was acutely aware that, moral issues of stealing a person’s genetic material to make another version of them aside, clones in reality were NOTHING like clones in the movies. The Sniper would have made some sympathetic noises and just sat beside him and let him talk himself out. 

He smacked his lips. His tongue felt like cardboard, his lips like sandpaper.  
He walked stiff-legged over to the small refrigerator he kept, and opened it. Its contents were sparse: a few more bottles of Red Shed beer, a few stray cans of Bonk that the Scout had asked him to hold onto, and a large plastic water jug.  
Next to the jug he found a sandwich, wrapped in white deli paper the particular fussy way Spy liked.  
He frowned and snatched the jug of water, poured a cup and drank it so fast his temples throbbed. For a long time he thought long and hard about the sandwich before finally sighing and taking it out of the fridge.  
The lettuce was still crisp and the bread still springy: it was fresh, and he felt like a complete ass. The Spy had probably walked over there in the small hours of the morning, through all that snow, just to bring it out to him.

He didn’t get a chance to apologize and thank him right away.  
The day’s battle opened with the BLU Medic marching their ubercharged Heavy right over their first two points, steamrolling past his sentry nest. The Scout died twice in five minutes just trying to examine their team configuration for the day, and the Engineer and the Pyro went down with his ship, so to speak, when the BLU Sniper took out his dispenser and the BLU Demoman bounced a bunch of grenades into the barn. The Pyro hadn’t had enough pressure in their tank to brush them back. 

Then, mercifully, the Demoman had gotten a gauntlet of stickies set up in the central barn, and managed to knock all the BLUs off the bomb with sheer grit; finally their own Medic, with the Heavy and Soldier in tow, came in and mopped up all the stragglers and stopped the BLU Engineer from setting up a sentry nest in their own forfeited barn. 

They hunkered down in their inner yard, guarding the second-to-last point. He managed to reconstruct all his buildings, but he could see, by then, that the show belonged to the Demoman: he was keeping them pinned nicely in the biggest barn, popping whoever stuck their head out into meaty chunks with well-placed grenades. 

The clock ran down and the BLUs never stuck their heads back out again after the one-minute mark, except a few stray flares their Pyro shot at them. Those felt more like an afterthought, an insult tossed by a sore loser. 

The Administrator’s voice congratulating them over the speakers came echoed and warped and weird in the cold yard. The Soldier, the Heavy, and the Scout all got together to push the bomb back.

“Fuck! Feels like these things get heavier all the time. Whaddaya think they put in them things, anyway?” the Scout asked.  
“Do not know,” the Heavy said. His face was bland but his voice was amused. “Maybe Scout would not have so much trouble if he pushed cart from the back and not the side.”  
“Heavy is correct! It is useless to push a cart sideways!” the Soldier added.  
“What! I ain’t--” the Scout protested, amidst their laughter.

The Engineer watched the events with his hands on his hips and an absent-minded frown on his face. He shook his head when the Heavy stood back from the cart and gestured at it with one hand, and the Scout responded by throwing himself against it and heaving as hard as he could. Which...did not do much.

He snorted a little, half-amused, half-annoyed. “Aww, hell, why don’t they just let the darned thing roll back to the Builder’s League base on its own?” He muttered under his breath. 

To his right, he heard, “If you ask the Soldier that, he will most likely say it is because it is not tactically wise to give the enemy team an advantage of the cart left on the field.” 

He tried valiantly not to jump, and whipped around find the Spy standing beside his dispenser, his hands splayed on top of the device’s warm top. He was giving the other man an amused look.  
“Oh...hello, Spy.”  
“You did very well for all of us today,” the Spy said. 

The Engineer rubbed the back of his neck with his organic hand, shrugging a little.  
“Aw, well now. There’s givin’ credit where it’s due, and then there’s mis-attributin’ credit entirely...you ought ta go thank the Demoman, it was him keepin’ those BLUs out there in the barn, not me...”

“I have already thanked him,” the Spy said. He produced a steel flask of whiskey from inside his jacket, smiling. “He gave me this. A congratulatory toast, he said.”  
They fell silent. Then, before things could grow too awkward, the Engineer pushed himself to speak.  
“Spy--”

The Scout ran past them, his cleated boots making a sudden racket on the wooden ramp inside the last barn as he rushed up it.  
Once he was gone, the Engineer continued, “Spy, I...I’d like to talk to you later. Properly, I mean.”  
The Spy smiled a little and nodded. He held out the flask and the Engineer accepted it, before the Spy turned and walked back towards their base. 

An hour later, he found the other man standing in the high tower overlooking the inner yard.  
Someone had dragged a metal folding chair up there--he suspected the Sniper--and the Spy was standing beside it, one hand resting on the metal curve of the backrest.

He cleared his throat as he came up into the tower behind the other man. The Spy acknowledged him with an over-the-shoulder glance and a small nod.  
The Engineer strode over to the doorway, where the Spy stood, and leaned against the other side of the wooden jamb, looking out into the cold, empty air it opened into.  
He wondered what the building had been used for before they took it over, wondered where the door had gone to.

“Spy,” he said, “I, uh. Well, what I mean to say is...I said some very ungentlemanly things to you last night, when you came out to check and make sure I wasn’t out there actin’ a damn fool. And I was,” he added. “I’d like to apologize.”  
He extended his hand. The Spy stared at it for a few seconds before sighing and shaking it, looking at the Engineer with tired eyes.  
“Yes, well. I am quite glad you have come back to your senses.”  
“I can personally attest that I was in full control of all my faculties, both mental and physical, for the entire duration of that there bout of ‘drunken stupor’,” the Engineer said. 

“That was rather elegantly-put,” the Spy said, smiling.  
“Oh, shut up, Spy,” the Engineer said. But the insult had no heat, and after a moment he mirrored the Spy’s smile with his own.  
“Er, oh,” the Engineer said. “I also wanted to thank you for the sandwich. That was...mighty kind of ya, Spy.”  
“Yes, I know,” the Spy said, preening in his peacoat. “I do not know what the rest of you would do without me.”  
And then the Engineer laughed, open and no longer self-conscious. 

They fell quiet for a moment, looking out over the yard in the fading late afternoon sunlight.  
The Scout was running laps, dressed in sweats and chewing bubblegum. Every now and then they’d see him go darting out of one of the sheds, or hear the distant thudding of his footsteps on the old wooden steps in the barns.  
The Medic and Heavy were shoveling snow away from the base doorway, piling it against the eastern fence. 

“What did you mean? About...not gettin’ what you wanted?” the Engineer asked, after a long moment. “Or has the moment passed and now the information will never again cross your lips?”  
The Spy gave him a tired, amused look. 

He exhaled cigarette smoke and looked across the narrow, crate-cluttered yard. The Sniper and the Pyro had just emerged from the base. He could see the Sniper had his bow, and the Pyro had one of their flamethrowers. They watched the Sniper ready an arrow, which the Pyro lit, before the marksman aimed high and let it fly. 

The arrow described a long, lazy arc through the air, before thudding into a target set up on the opposite side of the yard--one of the old burlap practice dummies. When the dummy ignited and began to really burn, the Pyro shouted happily, clapping their hands. They gestured for the Sniper to shoot again, and repeated the first actions. 

“I do not think I meant what you think I meant,” the Spy said. “Rather...just that we all have impossible hopes. I find they are most helpful when kept as cherished secrets.”  
The Spy said nothing else, and the Engineer’s mental tires spun in gravel, kicking up a lot of dust, so to speak, but going nowhere. He realized after a long moment spent in silence that the other man was not going to elaborate. 

“Well, don’t that beat all,” the Engineer said, deflating suddenly. He sagged against the doorframe, sighing.  
There was a rustle at his side and he glanced over and saw the Spy drawing a cigarette from his disguise kit. He offerered one to him, his eyebrow raised.  
“No thanks. Never could get used to the taste,” the Engineer said.

The Spy chuckled. The Engineer watched him drop the butt of his spent cigarette and grind it out beneath the toe of an expensive Italian leather brogue. The Spy placed the fresh cigarette on his lip, and pulled a matchbook from nowhere to light it.

“S’prised you don’t have some gizmo built into your disguise kit to light ‘em for ya,” the Engineer said.  
The Spy snorted. “Who says I do not? But really, this is the best way to light a cigarette. Lighters make everything taste of gas; electric burners make them taste metallic. This way, the only thing it tastes of is wood-smoke. Much more pleasant.”

“Of course,” the Engineer said.  
“But of course,” the Spy said, laughing a little. “So, now you know.”  
“Yeah. I suppose I do. Ain’t we just two of the unluckiest S.O.B.s this side of the Rockies,” the Engineer said. 

The Spy made a noise of assent. The Engineer, without knowing precisely why, felt better than he had in weeks. Maybe the Spy would tell him what, exactly, his ‘impossible hope’ was. Maybe he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. An ear to pour these thoughts into was turning out to be just the tonic he hadn’t realized he’d needed. 

The Engineer remembered the flask the Spy had given him earlier, stashed in a pocket inside his vest. He unscrewed the cap and took a smallish sip--the Demoman’s whiskey was not known for being mild--but was pleasantly surprised when it had only a mellow burn and a taste that reminded him of oak and amber. 

“Why’d you give this to me? This is some of his good stuff, y’know, not that cheap hooch he drinks to stay tipsy during matches.”  
“I know,” the Spy said. “That is why I gave it to you.”  
The Engineer chuckled a little. “I dunno how I’m supposed to repay you for all this, Spy--”  
“You are not supposed to repay me for anything,” the Spy said. 

The Engineer, blunt though he was, caught the meaning as clearly as if the man had written a note and handed it to him. Let me do something kind, the Spy was saying, Without questioning why I am doing it, or what I want in return.  
He supposed he could allow the Spy that.

~

Inside, the Demoman had set up a grenade assembly line on the kitchen table. 

“Pyro, no,” the Engineer said, and took the little cloth parcel of powder out of the Pyro’s hands. He replaced it with a book of matches--the cheap snap-off kind--with a cover printed with an advertisement for some motel in Las Vegas. 

The Pyro started to whine a little, until he gave them an old grease-stained rag, as well--at which point they happily skipped off to burn their new toy in private.  
The Engineer wasn’t too worried; the matchbook only had one match left in it.  
He turned to see the Demoman had watched the whole exchange over his shoulder with a smile.  
“Ach, ye might have let ‘em have it! Was nothin’ but a bit of powder, no more dangerous than a wee sparkler.”

So saying, he brushed glittering fragments off the backs of his own dark forearms. He was sitting down at the table’s farthest end, ranks of small grenades in front of him. He’d taken off his heavy flak vest and his usual red sweatshirt, and was down to a white thermal undershirt, the sleeves rolled up over his elbows.  
He was setting the grenades’ timer fuses. 

The Engineer could see he had a scars on his arms, the skin a matched shade of brown but hairless and shiny. Fewer scars than he would have expected, if he was honest.  
His forearms looked like Popeye the Sailor’s, whipcord muscles shifting beneath the dark skin. 

There were little round scars left from chemical burns, small narrow healed-up cuts and on one forearm, a broad, long swath where he’d been fire-burned. It looked old, the scar smooth and sunken. 

The Engineer wondered what they’d feel like, under his own fingers, under his palm.  
His mouth started watering.

“Don’t reckon that’s too good of an idea,” the Engineer said. Made himself say. He hoped the Demoman didn’t notice he’d been staring.  
But the other man had turned back to his work already.  
“Oh? Why’s that?” the Demoman wasn’t even looking at him.

The Engineer watched him reach for a grenade, fiddle with a cluster of wires on the little flat end, then screw the flat end onto a capsule. He watched him fill three, the other man’s hands smooth and quick, before the Demoman said, “Engineer? Why’s it not a great idea tae leave the Pyro with a bit of--”

He half-turned and noticed him standing there, probably looking like hell.  
“Are you all right there, mate?” the Demoman asked.  
The Engineer felt a slap of embarrassment. He didn’t know HOW he looked--he hadn’t been inside the base proper in days. 

Right when the other man’s concerned gaze was starting to become acutely uncomfortable, the Demoman said, “Wait! Did you eat dinner?”  
“I--well, no, I don’t suppose I did, I got a mite caught up workin’...” he trailed off, feeling exposed and uncertain.  
“There’s yer problem. If you look in the icebox, you’ll see there’s enough still left to feed everyone twice over.”  
“I suppose I could eat,” the Engineer said.

The Demoman smiled and it was like the sun was shining on him, warm and satisfying. That it was a secret made him feel like he’d sprung a leak inside and was slowly overflowing.  
The Demoman continued, “Would ye mind terribly if I joined ye? I’ve not stopped for a bite in hours, after settin’ the whole lot up.”

“No, sir! That’d be fine by me,” the Engineer said. “You, uh, drew the short straw to cook dinner again, huh?” the Engineer asked. (He didn’t actually know how they did that in the base, anymore. It was a universal given that two people were, under no circumstances, allowed to be in the kitchen alone--and those two people were himself, and the Pyro. The Pyro clearly was not allowed to be anywhere near a stove, or any other non-class-specified mechanized combustion device. The reason HE wasn’t supposed to cook wasn’t a mystery, either, as he knew exactly two recipes--and those were both for chili.) 

The Demoman gave him an amused look. “Aye. And when I drew the straw, I kept it.”  
“Tired of everyone else’s culinary stylings?” the Engineer tried.  
Oh, I hope he laughs, he thought.

The Demoman gave him a chuckle that made the standing-in-warm-sunlight feeling intensify. “Oh, sure, if that’s what you want tae call endless sauerkraut an’ sausage, beets, beets, an’ more beets, an’...well, bless the lad’s heart, but I STILL don’t know exactly what goes into a ‘Sloppy Joe’. And you and I and everyone else know that Spy calls caterers whenever it’s his turn, and has them deliver the stuff secretly. I don’t think he knows which end of the pan goes over the fire.”  
They laughed, at that. 

“I do suppose we’re all men of particular tastes,” the Engineer agreed, smiling. He hoped he was acting natural and not being obvious. “Leave Spy out of it, though. You know he ain’t right about fire.”

“Aye, I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?” the Demoman said. “Poor bloke. Of course, if I had that BLU devil after me as hard as he does, I don’t think I’d be right around open flames, either.”

The kitchen was still warm and smelled faintly of roasted meat. There was the quiet hum of the refrigerator and the softer sounds of snow still falling outside.  
The kitchen was long and narrow, and had likely been converted from something else: all of the new kitchenware that Reliable Excavation Demolition had put in looked awkward in the small space. There was the dishwasher, inside and immediately to the left; beside it, a huge beast of a stainless steel range, a combined oven and broiler next to it, and against the far wall, the small refrigerator. Beside it, the eight-foot-tall riveted stainless-steel door that opened into the huge freezer. It hardly seemed necessary, with the weather, the Engineer thought; it would have been easier to put everything in pillowcases and bury it outside in the snow. 

The other wall had a long, low gap in it, like the server’s window in a restaurant. This struck him as almost comical, since they were only a nine-man team, and there was never any demand for that much food, or for it to be out that fast.  
Beneath this window was another countertop, this one long and low, with assorted smaller appliances lined up on top of it. Above the countertop was a row of wall-mounted cupboards full of dishes and cups, and odd dry goods that hadn’t made it into the pantry proper. 

The Scout had left a comic book on the tall-legged stool they left there for the cook.  
“Sure smells good, whatever you made,” the Engineer said.  
“Ah, thanks mate! Roast beef,” he said. “I dinnae do anything fancy to it, ye know how Soldier gets.”  
“Yeah, I do,” he said, chuckling. 

The Soldier considered any food that didn’t come from a ration pack to be a foreign substance unfit for consumption by god-fearing red-blooded Americans. They’d all learned to just ignore him. He’d eat almost anything if you put sour cream on it, which was the biggest trick they’d ALL learned. 

He thought about this, about nuances and the team’s own personality quirks and things, as they puttered around together in the narrow kitchen.  
He caught himself slowing down, staring at the curve of the back of the Demoman’s head silhouetted in the light from the refrigerator, and forced himself to look away. He reached up to pull a can of coffee out of a cupboard, reminding himself to mind his own business.

Even if he WAS that sort of man--which the Engineer knew he was--he was also already with someone else.  
Still the feeling like spring sunshine persisted, obstinate. He clenched his teeth a little, annoyed at himself.  
“Want a cup of coffee? I sure could do for one, myself” he said.  
“Ah, coffee would be excellent,” the Demoman said. 

From the refrigerator the Demoman pulled a big enamel baking dish covered with aluminum foil tented high; this he placed on the countertop. Next, a metal baking pan, apparently full of pull-apart dinner rolls covered with a cloth napkin.  
Even cold, the delicious smells wafting off the food was enough to make the Engineer’s stomach rumble treacherously.

The Demoman looked over at him, glanced down at his midsection, and laughed.  
“A man gets busy! I understand,” he said. “Ah, I’ve skipped plenty a meal workin’ late.”  
And how was the Engineer supposed to tell him that he’d missed the last night’s dinner AND the morning breakfast because of him? --Because he’d seen how happy he was, sneaking around for clandestine meetings with the enemy Soldier? 

It somehow hadn’t occurred to him that while most other meals eaten at the base were slapdash--something quick and greasy with a side of coffee for breakfast, a whatever-you-have sandwich with a soda or coffee on the side for lunch--dinners were always deliberate. 

This was likely because he’d been slinking in like a surly tomcat after-hours and getting food when no one else was there, eating whatever leftovers he found in the refrigerator.  
But dinners were something he hadn’t paid much thought to, but always looked forward to. There was always a main course and no fewer than two sides, and almost always dinner rolls or biscuits, and real desserts--sweet buns, scones, sometimes cake. 

The Demoman had been cooking all the dinners, for however long he didn’t know.  
Putting two an two together made him feel...something. Happiness, he supposed; the Demoman was an excellent cook, and apparently more than happy enough to share his food and feed the team.  
The Engineer felt honestly touched by his generosity.

~

~ Later, in the Sniper’s van

“This, ah...this ain’t family-friendly fudge, is it?” the Engineer asked, with a little chuckle.  
The Sniper smirked a little. “Aww, mate! What would sweet little old Ms. Toklas say, if she heard someone thought her cookin’ unfriendly?” 

The Engineer laughed, relieved. He felt a little bit less like he was leaking, deflating.  
“Modified it, a bit,” the Sniper confessed, somewhat sheepishly. “’S a mite hard, comin’ up with whole cinnamon sticks an’ figs an’ whatnot, when you’re out away from everything and want a little trip.”  
“Tell me about it,” the Engineer said. “Heck, when I was a kid, we thought tomato ketchup was somethin’ fancy.”

The Sniper’s low, rumbling chuckle, before he moved back over to the narrow bed-turned-couch, handing the Engineer a small black graniteware plate. There were three squares of fudge, so dark a brown they looked almost black, attractively flecked with chunks of walnut and peanuts, and smelling of pepper and cinnamon.  
A moment later the Sniper sat down opposite him, his own plate on his lap. 

The fudge was dense and spicy and rich: the man didn’t cook much besides meat, but this one recipe was a particularly stellar one. The Engineer wondered if he’d learned the base recipe at his mother’s elbow and then gone back and revised it to the ‘adult’ version later, or if he really had read it out of a cookbook. 

They ate in companionable silence, the Sniper washing his down with something in an old dented army surplus canteen. 

“Want some?” the Sniper asked, when he noticed him looking. He held out the canteen, which sloshed invitingly.  
“Mind if I ask what it is?” the Engineer asked.

The Sniper snorted, laughing, and shook his head. “Don’t listen to Spy, he’d have you believing I piss in the same jars I drink out of. Would kind of make the whole Jarate business rather pointless, if I did--I’d always be runnin’ out of either cups or jars. Ya’d think someone as smart as him would figure that out. Anyway, it’s just iced tea.”

“Why, I’m shocked,” the Engineer said, smiling as he accepted the canteen. “I’d think someone leanin’ more towards British sensibilities would think cold tea on the rocks was some form of sacrilege.”

The Sniper rubbed his nose and shook his head. His smile was a little crooked.  
“I ain’t some poncy English bloke, what walks around with his nose in the air actin’ like his shit don’t stink. I like tea--hot, cold, whatever.”

The Engineer took a swallow, humming quietly in pleasure. The Sniper had cut his tea with a lot of lemon, so it had a pleasantly sour bite to it, cutting through the thick syrupy-sweetness of the fudge. He swished a mouthful around and swallowed.

They were silent together for a long while, looking out the little window at the winter scene that, under different circumstances, he would have called breathtaking: the setting sun was turning the mountains burnt-orange and gold, the sky violet. Here and there stars were starting to emerge, and the moon was a sickle-sharp crescent riding the horizon just over the crown of the tallest mountain. 

“What kinds of animals d’you s’pose live out in those hills?” the Sniper asked.  
“What?” the Engineer blinked, and looked over at him. The hash was finally catching him; everything felt slow and soft. Fuzzed-over, almost; everything felt like it was developing an additional soft surface.  
He swallowed thickly, leaning back against the camper wall and thinking.

“Hmm. Well, wolves, most likely. Deer. Bobcats, I reckon--no pumas, we’re too far north...hmm...coyotes, maybe.”  
“Cah-yotes,” the Sniper repeated, smiling.

When the Engineer looked back at him, his head was braced on one of his hands and he was smiling, amused.  
“What?” the Engineer said, again.

The Sniper shook his head again, still smiling. “’M always interested in the different ways people talk, all over the place.”  
“Y’mean you like the ways people mangle things up with different regional dialects and accents,” the Engineer said.  
“Yeah, that,” the Sniper said. “What’s a bobcat?”

The Engineer snickered. “An, uh.” He raised a hand, curled his fingers like claws, and made a slashing gesture, then made a gesture with one hand mimicking plucking at ears over his head.  
The Sniper bit his lips and his face turned red with suppressed laughter.

“Damn it, you know damn good and well what a--what--damn it. A lynx! You know damn good and well what a lynx is!” the Engineer said, banging one thigh with a loose fist.  
The Sniper let go, then, a whoop of laughter leaving him. 

“Well, yeah. Never seen one up close, though--not one that wasn’t stuffed, anyway. Haven’t got ‘em, in Oz,” this Sniper said. He stretched long arms over his head, yawning.  
“Oh, now don’t--” the Engineer said.  
It was too late. He yawned, too. 

The Sniper laughed at him again and the Engineer looked over at him and giggled a little.  
“Involuntary physical response.”  
“Yep. Yawns’re contagious,” the Sniper said.  
“That’s what I just said,” the Engineer said, still giggling.  
“Wiv a lot more words.”

“I am very partial towards multisyllabic words, yes,” the Engineer said, pretending to preen and straighten a vest he wasn’t wearing.  
The Sniper laughed again, and he joined him a moment later.

“I don’t mean to be forward,” the Engineer said. (This was rather backwards, he thought, as the Sniper was the one with his hand brushing HIS knee, not the other way around.)  
He considered his next few words very carefully.  
“But would you like to fool around?” he asked.  
The Sniper’s smile was all teeth and veyr inviting.  
“Mate...never thought you’d ask,” he said. 

The Sniper’s mouth tasted like the fudge, lemon, and tea--bitter and sweet swirling together inside his mouth as the other man gently fucked his mouth with his tongue.  
He set his hand on top of the Sniper’s and was surprised--and pleased--when the other man flipped his own over and entertwined their fingers, squeezing gently. 

The Engineer’s hat ended up on the bed behind them, his plate set off to the side. 

They kissed for a while longer, the Engineer rather enjoying the way he had to bend his neck or lean back to reach the Sniper’s lips, while the taller man’s mouth moved slowly and languidly against his. 

~  
~Later, back in the base 

The Engineer stood beside Sniper there in the hallway a minute, the warmth settling into his chilled skin.  
“Wonder why it’s so dark,” the Sniper muttered, after a moment.  
He was right; all the overhead lights had been turned off, and the hallway was lit only dimly wiht the pale, diffuse grayish light from the outdoor lights. 

“I dunno. Ya think maybe Soldier got some idea into his head about the lightbulbs, or--?”  
The Sniper chuckled. “Heh. That, or teh Medic tried somethin’ with the Medigun and the voltage shorted somethin’ out again.”  
The Engineer snorted in amusement and shook his head. 

The smell of coffee was heavy in the air, along with the smell of burnt bread and cinnamon--and now that they were inside, they could hear a low mumble of voices coming from the common room.  
Down at the end of the hall, they could see a ruddy orange light spilling out into the door from the common room.

Inside it was almost completely dark, lit mainly by the glow coming from the big cast-iron stove: through the grate that opened into its belly, a yellow-orange glow of fire spilled into the room, washing everything into black shadows silhouetted in the orange light.

He could see the Scout sitting on the floor beside the coffee table, one elbow propped on it; the Pyro was curled up on the old, scorched braid rug beside the stove. The coffee table was dominated by an absolute cathedral of candles, all apparently lit with some flame source much larger than a match. Several had been melted and fused together, and the others were standing in jars, in cracked mugs, stuffed into the mouths of beer bottles the Pyro had commandeered to serve as impromptu candlesticks.

The Demoman was sitting in a chair to one side of the stove, visible only as a pair of legs and his face in profile. The Medic and Heavy were sitting together on the main couch; the Spy was sitting in an armchair to the right of the couch, identifiable chiefly by the fleck of embers glowing at the end of his cigarette. The Soldier was sitting on the second, broken-down couch pushed against the wall beside the stove, trying (and failing) to discreetly dry out three pairs of socks he had draped over the couch’s armrest.  
The Engineer and Sniper filed inside carefully, mindful of dropped boots and socks, wending their way around to stand behind the couch.  
“What’s goin’ on in here?” the Engineer asked.

The Scout started a little and squinted around in the dark until he saw them.  
Medic’s voice said, from somewhere in the red-tinted gloom, “Didn’t you notice? There’s been a power outage.”  
“Nothing but the most essential functions remained on,” the Spy’s voice, sounding arch and annoyed, “And, as usual, personnel equipment was not on this list.”

The Soldier chimed, “I am surprised you did not notice, Engie!”  
The Engineer had a split second to feel flustered, during which the Sniper became very interested in his hat, removing it to brush off the faint dusting of snow on it.  
“Why would he?” the Spy’s voice again. The Engineer could just make out the thin man’s form in the armchair to the right, nearer the stove. “His workshop has its own generator.”

There was a general outcry that the Engineer raised his hands in a placating gesture to quiet; he protested, “Well, now, that ain’t entirely fair. It’s just a shed, boys, the walls ain’t much thicker than cardboard. That little generator doesn’t do much but keep the lights on.” 

The outcry died down, until the Scout piped back up, “Well, that’s just GREAT. Now we know for sure we ain’t gonna have TV anytime soon. C’mon, Demo, give us a story!”  
“You’ve still not told me which kind you want,” the Demoman said. He sounded amused.  
“A ghost story!”

The Medic, muttered, “This again! We’ll be trapped here listening to some nonsense about ghosts rattling chains in the halls of ruined castles...”  
Unfortunately, teh Scout heard him. “Yeah,well, that’s still better than some boring sappy shit where the people spend half the story cryin’ or some shit--”

“If you cannot decide what to tell a story about,” the Heavy said, suddenly ominous, “Then *I* will tell ghost story.”  
The Scout scoffed. “Huh! Yeah, right!”  
But the Medic was already agreeing with the Heavy. 

Amidst the general chatter--including the Demoman’s protest that he was tired, and would like to hear a story himself, for once, instead of always being the one to tell them--the Sniper nudged him in the side and tilted his head towards the kitchen, and they slipped away unnoticed.

The kitchen was several degrees colder than the rest of the base, already, and almost completely dark: the big rectangle of kitchen window opened onto a scene of the outer yard, dark and still but for the snow falling in hurrying, insistent flurries. Every now and then the wind would sigh through the barns and whistle past the eaves, pulling the snow into whirling curlicues or sharp curves. 

The Sniper stopped in the doorway and shook himself, making a noise of protest against the cold. The Engineer chuckled a little, and together they spent a companionable five or so minutes rooting through drawers until they found a pack of candles the Pyro had missed when they’d surely raided the kitchen earlier. 

The Engineer went to the stove to try to light them and stood there for a good thirty seconds fiddling with the dials before he remembered--then stood up, laughing a little self-effacingly.  
The Sniper made a questioning noise--he’d been leaned over into the refrigerator, scorugning up sandwich fixings--and when he came back up and saw the Engineer standing there holding the unlit candles, looking a little helpless--he laughed quietly, his voice gruff and soft as ashes in the dim light.  
“Hang on a minute--” the Sniper began  
“I think I’ve got--” the Engineer said.

They stared at each other a minute before laughing again. Then the Engineer patted himself down a final time and came up with a small book of matches. He lit the candles and handed the Sniper one, remembering only once the light hit his face that the other man hadn’t put his aviators back on. 

Before he could end up staring, he turned back to the fridge, looking down at its contents.  
“Doesn’t seem like there’s much in the way of food that would taste too good cold,” the Engineer said.  
“Ahh, we’ll manage. Couple sandwiches and we’ll be right,” the Sniper said.

Feeling very much like a teenager sneaking food back to his room, the Engineer followed the Sniper back to the common room, sandwich in hand. The jumble of voices was still spilling into the hall, the Scout’s louder than the others’. 

“Damn, c’mon, somethin’ GOOD! Somethin’, ANYTHIN’ to deal with just sittin’ here in the dark. I mean, it’s too freakin’ dark to even go back to my room! I’d like to NOT trip an’ die on the stairs, if you know what I mean.”  
The Heavy said, “This is what comes of too much American relying on television and radio for entertainment. Scout is soft-in-the-head--”

“What’s that, Big, Bald, and...uh...”  
“Goodness, alliteration! And I had reached the conclusion that all but basic grammar was out of his reach,” the Spy said.  
“Screw you, Spy,” the Scout said, without any real rancor. The effect of his mock-anger was dampened even further by the way he kept craning his neck around and squinting into the darkness.  
“Hey...where are you, even?”  
“Right behind you,” the Spy said, his voice dry. “And since you and Medic cannot agree on what sort of story you would like the Demoman to tell you, perhaps you could be sensible and let the Heavy tell the story.”

“Okay okay okay JEEZ, holy shit, Heavy, why don’t you just go after Demo? That way *I* don’t have to die of boredom right away, AND Medic still get to hear a sad story about some cryin’ chick and her dead boyfriend.”  
“This sounds good,” the Heavy said.  
Another jumble of voices, everyone talking at once. 

“Nah, nah, nah, tell a GOOD one--tell a ghost one!” he could hear the Scout say.  
The Demoman looked at him, smiling indulgently. “And which ‘good one’ would you like?”

“Uh--I--I dunno. Um. The one, maybe, with the lady who kills dudes with her crazy hair? No, no, wait! What about the thing with the guy who turns into an evil horse and drowns people? Nah, that one’s more goofy than scary--oh! Wait! What about the one with the three sailors who die and then come back to their old mom from beyond the grave?” the Scout said.  
“Ah,” the Demoman said, closing his eye and leaning back slightly in the chair. “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”  
“Yeah! That one!”

The Medic cut in, “Oh, Demoman, please, something PLEASANT for once, not another melodramatic--”  
“--Da, agree with Doktor, we hear sad things very often,” the Heavy added.  
“’Mellow-dramatic’? YOU’RE the one who keeps askin’ for those drippy love ones, ‘Oh, I LOVE my husband but he’s DEAD, woe is me, I gotta go jump into the river where we first met, boo hoo freakin’ hoo, it’s eighteen-fifty-whatever an’ i ain’t got no other life prospects--” the Scout said, in a high, mincing voice, his hands clasped and pressed against his cheek. “C’mon, man, tell us a GOOD one!”

The Medic threw up his hands. “Ach. Forget it. Please, Demoman, tell whatever sort of story you would like.”  
The Engineer could hear the Heavy mumbling, “...will indulge spoiled child-man, or else we will never have peace. He will be annoying all night...” 

~Later, in the Engineer’s room  
A moment later he heard a soft knock on his door.  
He rolled over and got up to answer it. The greeting he had ready for Spy died on his lips when he saw the Sniper standing there, instead, hat off and glasses in one hand.  
“Oh!” he said. A smile spread across his face before he could think of anything else to say.

The Sniper mirrored it, leaning a little against the doorway.  
“Snow’s gotten worse. Don’t think I’d make it back out to me camper; figured I’d stay in for the night.”

“Well,” the Engineer said, and then--because his mother had raised a gentleman--he stepped aside and made a welcoming gesture.  
The Sniper growled a little, pleased, and brushed close to him as he passed into the room.  
“S’prised you ain’t in there listenin’ with the rest of ‘em,” the Sniper said, jerking a thumb abck in the direction of the common room.

The Engineer shifted a little where he stood, and the mumbled, “Ah. I ain’t...too much in the mood for any tall tales tonight...”  
The Sniper made a sympathetic noise. “The hash give you bad dreams, if you’re not careful?” he asked.  
“What? Oh, no,” the Engineer said--and immediately wished he hadn’t. Stripped of an excuse, he didnt have a real reason to sit out of teh storytelling round--the Demoman was a legendary storyteller, better, usually, than listening to a radio program and a match, even, for most TV programs. No one sat out unless they were sick or--well.  
The Sniper glanced down at his bed, and then back up at the Engineer.  
“Go right ahead, make yourself comfortble,” the Engineer said, smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have a beta-reader! I also didn't run this through a spellcheck yet; oh dear. Still, as always, I hope you enjoyed reading. Comments are always appreciated!


	11. The Kid Is Back In Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Obligatory OC thing, written in 2015)
> 
> “Who, EXACTLY, is supposed to be comin’ back to the base? ‘Cause it sure as hell ain’t Miss Pauling, or she’d’ve come’n’gone already, AND you guys wouldn’t’a put on the Ritz like this, AND you’d’a just told me. So come on and fess up. Who the hell IS this guy?”  
> “Our first Scout,” the Spy said.  
> “Huh?”  
> “You did not believe you were the only one?” the Frenchman continued, still buttering the biscuit he held. He did not look up at the Scout.

The Scout woke up hearing voices outside in the corridor.  
For a split second he panicked, jumping slightly in bed, before twisting in the sheets like a cat to get a look at his alarm clock--  
\--which read 5:04.   
He relaxed, heaving a huge sigh and flopping back against his pillow. He’d been late to a match ONCE, and the Administrator had chewed his ass over the phone so long, and so hard, that he felt like a twelve-year-old again, in trouble for cutting class and getting a scolding from the principal. Then Miss Pauling had shown up right before dinner with a demure smile and a two-inch-thick stack of paperwork for him to fill out, all of which could be boiled down to: ‘You have been warned; fuck up one more time and we will fire you, which would also violate your contract, which will leave YOU owing us more money than you could ever possibly make, even if you had three lifetimes’.   
He really didn’t need the hassle again, and was glad he hadn’t overslept.   
Still, he didn’t know why anyone would be awake at that hour--or, more accurately, why more than one person would be awake at that hour, since sometimes Soldier would patrol the hallways, or the Spy would sneak out to go do whatever it was he did outside. Most often, if he got up at weird hours and went to pee or sneak a sandwich or something, he’d find the Demoman still awake and reading, or the Heavy, on the phone, talking quietly in Russian.  
Gray early morning light was seeping through thw thin curtains on the window, trailing glostly-pale blue-white fingers across the ceiling. The sun wasn’t even up, for Christssakes!  
And yet the Engineer was in the hallway outside, mumuring fasr and excited.  
The Heavy’s voice answered him. “...really? Cannot be true! ...tells you...must be in France by now!”  
Then the Soldier, “I KNEW he’d eventually get tired of those croutons and come back to the good old US of A!”  
This continued for about ten minutes.  
They weren’t exactly loud, but it was cold as balls and he’d been really enjoying his the dream he’d been having--he was a baseball player with a really sweet all-black uniform, fighting monsters with a silver baseball bat.  
He’d pulled his comforter up over his head and was stretched out comfortably underneath it, but now that he was awake, all he was aware of was how hungry he was and how cold his feet were.  
He rolled over and tried to close his eyes, but then there were more footsteps in the hallway, and soon it sounded like everyone was up and walking around, talking quietly but excitedly.   
When he heard a door open and shut somewhere, then footsteps on the stairs, then the Sniper’s voice--the SNIPER, who even in all this cold STILL preferred to live out in his van--he realized it must be important.  
So he got up, cursing under his breath at how cold the floor was, and the drawer pulls felt like frozen drops of Satan’s own piss, and how EVERYTHING felt frozen, Jesus, all right, he was from Boston but it never got THIS cold there--or if it did, he didn’t notice--and pulled on some sweats.   
By the time he’d finished getting dressed, their voices had faded out of the hallway. He followed the sounds down the hall, into the dining hall, where everyone was already sitting.   
There wasn’t even any food on the table, but they were all up, sitting and talking, excited.  
The Engineer was the only one who noticed that he came in, who greeted him and waved him over to a seat beside himself that he’d saved.   
“What’s all the commotion? I gotta run my damn legs off all day, an’ then get woken up at the asscrack’a’dawn the next day, too?”  
The Heavy glanced at him and then said, “We are talking of having a guest.”  
The Scout straightened up, at that. ‘Guests’ usually meant ‘Miss Pauling’--though there had been the one time when one of the bigwigs had sent some suit named Mr. Bidwell along with their newest weapon shipments while they were setting up at the new base at Powerhouse. He didn’t think the guy had said more than ten sentences the entire time he’d been there, but he’d been REAL keen on checking their kill counts, weapon damage statistics, and stuff like that. He’d only stayed three days, and the whole time the Scout hadn’t seen him eat--or even sit down--once.   
“Oh, yeah? Who?” he said, feigning casualness.   
“No one you know,” the Medic said, then turned back to his conversation with the Heavy.  
The Scout made a face and stuck out his tongue, and mimicked him in a whining, nasal voice, “No one YOU know, Scout! You’re just a stupid kid!”  
“Now, Scout, no one said that,” the Engineer said.  
“Yeah, but look how everybody’s actin’! You might as well say, ‘this is cool big kid stuff, Scout, an’ we ain’t gonna tell you ‘cause you’re too little’!” the Scout said, gesturing at the Medic and the Heavy.  
The Two older men gave him annoyed looks. The Medic clicked his tongue in annoyance, and the Heavy shook his head.  
Then they turned arond again and resumed talking--this time in German.   
The Scout grumbled some more under his breath.  
A few minutes later the Spy came in with a baking dish piled high with waffles--another dead giveaway, as waffles were something Spy could make one-handed and blindfolded (a trick he’d shown them one day, after the Engineer had tried to call him on his bluff). So the Frenchman was phoning it in as far as cooking went, even though the Scout knew that normally, the Spy would babysit a skillet for freaking EVER with the heat turned down almost as low as it could go, just to make sure his scrambled eggs were perfect.   
Something was definitely up.   
“Okay, no, seriously, guys, what the fuck is goin’ on?” he asked.   
“Exactly what the Heavy said, lad,” the Demoman said. “We’re going tae have a guest! Ach, what a rare treat! How long’s it been, lads, since we’ve seen him?”  
“It has been six years,” the Spy said. Then, a moment later, he turned in his chair, and with poorly-concealed enthusiasm written all over himself, asked the Engineer, “And you are SURE? You are SURE he said he was coming?”  
“Yeah! Said he was stopping off for somethin’ nearby. He’s comin’ back to America to do a tour, he said, an’ he had a couple days to himself. Said he’d be here by Friday.” The Engineer was grinning broadly.  
The Scout, figuring if they were going to ignore him, then he was going to use it to his advantage. He reached for the waffles, barehanded, only to have a much larger hand suddenly descend on his and close around his wrist.  
He looked up into the Heavy’s disapproving face. The older man said nothing, only raised one finger and made a no-no gesture. He pointed at the pair of tongs already on the table’s lazy-susan.   
The Scout scoffed in annoyance and got the tongs, and wasted a really good, really theatric eye-roll on the back of the Heavy’s head, since the older man had already turned away.

Things went on like that for a week.   
If he’d felt like they didn’t take him serioisly before, now it was a thousand times worse--they barely even seemed to notice him at all.   
The Spy was being weirdly maudlin, and more than once, the Scout had gone into the kitchen in off-hours to make himself some coffee and sit and read in peace, only the Frenchman there, consulting from a small library of cookbooks.   
Whenever he tried to ask what he was making, the older man had shook his head and said, “Food worthy of a gourmand,” as if he knew what the fuck that was--and then he’d gone back to reading his cookbooks.  
The guy was READING cookbooks.  
The Scout already felt like an egghead for reading AT ALL, but that was just weird. Who actually DID that?   
The Pyro was apparently set on decorating the base, and streamers started to appear everywhere--even a little garland of cutout paper guys, all colored in to resemble a Scout.  
That was Monday. On Tuesday the Scout surprised the Demoman at breakfast time.  
There was a panel of floorboards in the middle of the kitchen that he’d remived, and the Scout was interested--but somehow not surprised--that there was a fairly large secret compartment there, where apparently the Demoman kept a few bottles of special brew.  
“Aw, sweet! How many secret hidin’ places are there around here? What else ya got in there? Can I see?” he’d asked.  
“Ah, maybe later.”  
“Aw, man! Seriously? Come on, I ain’t gonna tell nobody!”   
But the Demoman had just shaken his head. On his way out of the kitchen, he’d stopped in the doorway, turned, and said, “And I’d better not find a SINGLE missin’ bottle later, ye hear me?” the Demoman had said, one finger pointed at him.  
The Scout had drank his coffee in sullen silence, and even the really gory Poe story he’d been reading wasn’t enough to distract him from his bad mood. 

 

Over the breakfast table there was a festive, almost holiday air. The Demoman and the Spy were talking conspirarotially about baking a cake; the Heavy and Medic kept muttering back and forth in Russian and German and glancing at the clock, and then at the door, their faces pinched up in anticipation. 

“A’right, I had all I can take.” the Scout announced, standing up and planting his feet slightly harder than was strictly necessary.  
If he was honest with himself, he’d admit that yes, he’d stomped his feet. But he also felt ike it was what he had to DO, just to get their attention good.  
“Who, EXACTLY, is supposed to be comin’ back to the base? ‘Cause it sure as hell ain’t Miss Pauling, or she’d’ve come’n’gone already, AND you guys wouldn’t’a put on the Ritz like this, AND you’d’a just told me. So come on and fess up. Who the hell IS this guy?”  
“Our first Scout,” the Spy said.  
“Huh?”  
“You did not believe you were the only one?” the Frenchman continued, still buttering the biscuit he held. He did not look up at the Scout.  
“...Well, yeah, i kinda did! What the hell, man! What else is there that you guys ain’t told me?”  
“You don’t need to worry so much about it,” the Engineer said, and the Scout figured he was trying to be reassuring. “You’re the only new recruit. Scoutin’s a hard job, son.”  
“Yeah, don’t I know it.” He paused, then screwed up his face. “Still! How come you guys didn’t say nothin’ about him? We’ve been a team for almost a year now!”  
“It never came up,” the Engineer said.   
The Spy scoffed slightly. “It might have, if you had asked.”

The Scout was lying on the couch, still wrapped in his comforter, feeling miserable and not really understanding why.  
Maybe it was because of how--well, how eager everyone clearly was for this old guy to come back.  
He didn’t think any of them had EVER been that happy to see him. Hell, he LIVED there, and his birthday had come and gone without so much as a card or a fucking balloon! And there the Spy and the Demoman were, talking about baking some jackass who didn’t live there--and who HADN’T, for years now--a fucking cake!  
He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and then, to be spiteful (and because no one else was there to scold him) he wiped it on the couch’s armrest.   
There was a Lone Ranger rerun marathon on, and he’d come into the rec room almost an hour ago to lie there in the dark, watch TV, and mope in peace.   
He hugged his knees tighter and stared at the TV, bleakly wishing he could escape into the show, even if it WAS kind of dorky. The Lone Ranger was flying across the screen on his horse Silver, alongside a runaway train. He started thinking about trains--about how many trains he’d have to take before he could make it home, how many stations he’d have to stop in, if he would have time to buy a present for his Ma before getting back on the road.   
The voices interrupted his thoughts.

“Whoo-ee! How come y’all’re keepin’ the place so cold! Damn! Don’t tell me it’s Builder’s United Icicle Farm now!” the voice said.  
The Scout felt his stomach sinking even further, if that was possible.   
Then, before he could get up off the couch and slink out of the room, the door was opening, and there he was.  
He was tall, thin, and on the wiry side of muscular, with warm red-brown skin, close-cropped black hair with a deep part etched above his right eyebrow. He had a very cheerful face, and the Scout could immediately tell he was one of those perplexingly ageless-looking people who might be seventeen or twenty-seven. His eyes were rather round, with deep creases in his eyelids; he had arched eyebrows and a broad button nose above full, smiling lips.   
He was wearing a butter-colored camelhair pea coat, light tan gloves, pants so dark brown they were almost black, and yellow buff leather Chelsea boots. Around his neck he had a beige scarf with a black plaid pattern on it (the Spy had one just like it). He was carrying a suitcase in either hand, and had a parcel wrapped in brown paper under his right arm. He paused in the doorway to half-turn and yell back at the Engineer and Heavy, who the Scout could see standing behind him in the hallway.   
“I’ll tell you one thing, I sure am glad i DIDN’T drive down here! I’d have frozen my damn everything off, moneymakers and all. Jesus, Mary, n’ Joseph--’scuse me, grandma--tell me they didn’t get rid of the old iron stoves! Why y’all got it so dim in here? Ain’t you gonna even put up no decorations? You KNOW it’s about to be Thanksgiving, right? What are y’all gonna have?”  
He was already striding into the room, depositing things on various pieces of furniture as he went--the scarf, over the back of the Engineer’s favorite armchair, and one of the suitcases right in front of it, while the other he stuffed alongside the chair. Gently, he set the wrapped parcel down on teh other chair, then shucked his gloves and slapped them down on the couch’s armrest, right near the Scout’s feet. He unbuttoned his coat quickly, nimble fingers flashing. The Scout saw little gold rings glittering on both his pinkie fingers.

The Scout gasped. Under his coat, the other young man was wearing a brown sweater he’d seen the Sniper knitting, months ago, and forgotten about. He’d figured the other man had made a mistake or something, and taken it down, but--there it was.  
Right as the others came in from the kitchen, too.   
The Scout, who had already felt nervous, now actually felt invisible.   
There was a loud, excited honking from somewhere--he figured it was the Pyro--and then someone reached out and flicked on the lights.  
The other young man blinked a little, bit, laughing 

“Well well welly welly well!” the young man said, and then--with an exaggerated leap, crossed the room to stand beside the Spy.   
“I ain’t surprised to see YOU still here! These knuckleheads wouldn’t know what to do without ya, would they?”   
The Spy chuckled, shaking his head, and DIDN’T shank the guy when he held his arms out for a hug. He actually leaned in and hugged him back.   
“It is very good to see you again,” the Spy said, when they separated. He was smiling--really smiling--crow’s feet and all, his eyes all lit up like it was Christmas.   
“Good ta see you, too! I got somethin’ for ya, hang on,” the other man said, and made a show of patting his pockets before reaching into his coat and, with a flourish, pulling back out a small black box.   
There was a gold stripe down its front, and it was tied with a little blue bow, and the Spy gasped, either genuinely surprised or doing a damn good job of faking--before taking the gift. “Thank you, Scout!”  
“Ah, it was nothin’,” the young man--the other Scout--said, and he stuck his hands in his pants pockets and rocked back on his heels, smiling. The Spy gasped AGAIN when he opened the box and pulled out a bottle of cologne.   
“It--you--how?!” he asked, his eyes wide.  
“Yanno, you would not BELIEVE the free shit they give to musicians.” he said, then winked. “An’ my nose, it knows!” he said.  
Laughing, he skipped over to the Engineer, and pulled another box, this one about the size of a book, out of another pocket. “So i picked this up in Japan. Thought you’d get a kick out of it.”  
The Engineer had the top off the box in seconds and was holding onto a very small, very modern-looking transistor radio, with a collapsible antenna.   
“Oh, Scout! You--you know how much these things cost?”  
“Well, yeah. I bought it!” he laughed. “Check it out, you would not BELIEVE the range on these things. You get up high enough an’ you can pick up signals from, like, hundreds a’ miles away. No joke!”  
While the Engineer was going off on a science nerd tangent about the radio, the other Scout stood back, hands on his hips, grinning at him and nodding every now and then.  
Next, the Medic, to whom he made a playful little bow, before coming back up again. He gave him a small box, which when the Medic opened it had a little rectangular cake of something yellow and waxy-looking in it. “From Berlin,” he said. “I was in an instrument shop and this guy recognized me an’ got real excited. Said he was from Mittenwald. I was gonna buy you a violin, but I don’t think you’d have parted with your old one, huh?” He smiled, then stiffened suddenly.  
“Oh! Wait! I got ya some sheet music, too, hang on a sec,” he said, then sprang across the room again.  
He grabbed one suitcase and popped it open, revealing its contents to be nothing but more presents, and came back up with something that looked like a magazine. The Medic opened it and it was sheet music, and whatever it was must have been really good, because he kept flipping through it and staring.   
“Y’like it? I knew you would!” the other Scout said.  
For the Pyro there was a small box of fireworks. “Japanese,” he said. “These ain’t even legal in America. Don’t tell nobody you got ‘em from me! What you do is, you light the end and then let it go.”   
For the Soldier, some sheet music, too, apparently for his trumpet.  
“There!” the Scout said. “Now maybe you can give them beat-up ol’ bugles a rest, and play a REAL instrument!”  
The Soldier pretended to be offended and put him in a headlock, which he weaseled out of with incredible ease, still laughing. He straightened his sweater, then looked down at it and back up at the Sniper.  
And then he gave the Sniper some yarn from New Zealand, some other yarn from Peru, some MORE yarn from Turkey, and finally some fancy wooden knitting needles from Ireland. (“I got a confession to make. I ain’t never been to New Zealand or Turkey or Peru. I bought the yarn from this specialty shop in London.” he said.)  
For the Heavy, a beautifully-bound volume of Russian poetry, and a few small, but equally exquisite books by some chick named Anna Akhmatova, which the Heavy was overjyed about, enough that he swept the other Scout up in a crushing hug. The other Scout responded by ragdolling playfully, and the Heavy yelled something in Russian, laughing, then put him down and thumped him on the back a bunch of times, grinning like a loon.   
The Demoman presented HIM with a bottle of something, and he gave the Demoman a bottle in return, saying, “Yeah, so, I know it ain’t, like, hundred-year-old scotch or nothin’, but this stuff packs one hell of a punch. Those guitarists in Mexico City party like it’s their job! I mean, I was like, ‘Damn! Y’all gon’ go to sleep? No? Sun’s been up for a minute!’”  
It was a bottle of real agave nectar tequila.   
Finally, while everyone else was still ooh-ing and aa-ing all over their presents, he stood back with his hands on his hips, just smiling at them.  
Then he seemed to remember something, and looked around.  
“So, guys,” he said. “Where’s the, uh...the new...”  
The Scout, feeling mortified, realized abruptly that they hadn’t even realized he was there. They just thought he was an old blanket, probably covering a pile of dirty laundry.  
He was also suddenly, embarrassingly aware of the fact that he was only wearing pajamas, while everyone else was dressed.   
The Spy and Demoman each started for the door across the room but he coughed and sat up before they made it around the couch.  
The old Scout looked at him, incredulous for a moment, then smiling, then laughing.   
“So-o-o,” he said. “You must be the new Scout, huh?”  
He stuck out his hand to shake.  
“Yeah,” the Scout said, bristling a little at his tone. He stared at the other guy’s hand until the other Scout looked back down at it, shrugged a little, and then took his hand and put it right back on his hip. His grin dimmed to a slightly smaller smile.  
The other young man only smiled. “Don’t worry. I ain’t here to snatch your job or nothin’. I just missed the guys, is all. I can’t be flyin’ all over the place an’ playin’ my fingers off all the time, can I?”  
The Scout scowled. If the guy was trying to intimidate him with bragging, it wasn’t going to work.  
“I guess not. Must be real hard, bein’ so famous while half the people in America don’t even know who you are.” he said, and stuck out his chin.  
The room got quiet real quick.  
The Spy looked over at him, arch and annoyed, and the Demoman’s eyes went between the old Scout and him before hardening in a way he’d never really seen before.  
Before he could stuff his own foot any further down his own throat, the other Scout chuckled a little. His expression was sad.  
“I figured you’d say somethin’ like that. They all said you had one helluva chip on your shoulder, when you first got here.”  
“I ain’t got--”  
“...They also told me you like baseball, too.” he continued smoothly, before the Scout even had time to get his own insult out.   
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”  
“Then you’re gonna LOVE this,” the other Scout said.   
He went back to the suitcase and knelt down, adn then looked up and smirked a little.  
“Well, c’mere! Holy shit, man, I ain’t gonna bite ya!”  
The Scout shuffled over--abandoning his blanket cocoon on the couch--and knelt beside him on the faded, threadbare rug. The other young man reached into the suitcase and pulled up a smallish box, which he thrust at the Scout.  
“Here.”  
The Scout took it, but only looked at it numbly, before the other Scout made a scoffing noise and said, “Well, open it! There ain’t no ‘do not open ‘til Christmas’ sticker or nothin’.”  
But he was smiling.  
So the Scout pulled off the ribbon and popped the box open and found...a baseball. It looked relatively new, but it seemed like a plain baseball nonetheless.  
It seemed almost absurdly insulting, compared to all the cool shit everyone else had, and he was about to give the other young man a bland ‘thank you’ when he happened to turn the ball over.   
He almost choked.  
“Juh--J--Jah--JACKIE ROBINSON!” he hollered, before he could control himself, his eyes as wide as saucers.  
“Yeah!” the other Scout said, and the Scout couldn’t move. “There’s a card in there somewhere, too. He was real nice.”  
The Scout couldn’t SPEAK, either, so he just fell over on to his ass and sat there staring at the other young man, who started laughing and couldn’t stop. 

(the Scout and the older Scout are lying there in bed

“So...how come you quit?” 

“I’m just lookin’ forward to some American food. Please, my kingdom for a hamburger and some fries. Maybe a shake. Pyro still burnin’ all the food up?”   
“Nah. Spy took over cooking a little while after I came.”  
The other Scout laughed, then whistled, a low, impressed note. “All the time?”  
“Yeah. He’s really good.”  
“Oh, I know! He used to make all our holiday food. Salmon coulibiac, bouchees a la reine, coq au vin, boeuf bourginnone, holy shit! One year he made this, like, giant bomb-shaped cake and spent a whole day holed up in the kitchen covering it with fondant. It was so realistic, Pyro wouldn’t let anyone cut it until Engie cut a chunk out of the top and said he’d ‘defused’ it.”  
They both laughed a little.  
There was a rustling of fabric and the older Scout yawned and said, “For real, though. I just want a burger. Be real nice to get somethin’ homestyle, after all that international food. I mean, don’t get me wrong or nothin’, other countries’ foods is fantastic, but you can’t get a decent hamburger nowhere outside America. S’one of the only things I missed.”   
“Don’t get too excited,” the Scout said. “Spy spent all last week goin’ over his cookbooks. He’s probably gonna make, like, an insanely fancy French food for us all while you’re here.”  
And he laughed at the other Scout’s exaggerated groan.   
They were quiet for a moment before the Scout remembered something.  
He rolled over again.  
“Uh, hey--”  
“Oooh, you better NOT say my name!”  
“--oh. Uh. Scout? Yeah, uh. Listen, I...I’m sorry I was a jerk earlier. I was just mad.”

“Ya mind?” the first Scout asked.  
“Uh--no, sh-sure,” the Scout said. With a kind of effortless grace the Scout envied down in the depths of his belly and would never tell ANYONE about, the older young man took the bat from him, letting it hang from his slack fingers.  
He frowned after a moment. “These new aluminum bats...I don’t really like ‘em. Too light, hard to tell how hard you’re hittin’ something. And then they don’t make that real satisfyin’ crack, you know...” he mimed hitting a ball.

The ball sailed through the air in a perfect arc, smashing the bottle.  
“Holy shit! You--that’s gotta be--”  
“’Bout three hundred feet, yeah. Used ta practice in old railyards, knockin’ down soda cans with rocks.” He smiled over at him.   
“Railyards, huh?” he asked. “Where’re you from?”  
“Eh, L.A. How ‘bout you? Where you from?”   
“Boston.”

In his earpiece, someone whistled a quick melodic note, before a blur in blue and white exploded past him.  
It was the original Scout, in a re

He twisted in midair, the Force cocked up tight into his armpit, and fired twice, and sailed like a dancer over the Soldier’s head.  
The enemy Soldier’s rockets sailed past him, tearing up dirt behind him as he landed BEHIND the man.  
Without breaking stride he swung around, snatching his bat from his bag and swatting the RED Soldier with it in the back of the head.   
The RED turned around, swearing and stuffing rockets back into his launcher, but he wasted another one on the ground--this time driving himself backwards.  
The BLU Scout was already in the air again, with the Force ringing out two more times. He jumped to the left again, reloading.  
The Soldier, now badly disoriented, aimed a final shot at the ground where the Scout HAD been standing.   
There was a final explosion and this time the poor RED s.o.b flew apart, one of his legs landing near the Scout’s foot. His head, torso, and arms came flopping back to earth a few moments later with horrible meaty slaps.   
“Holy shit,” the Scout said.  
“Damn, I am RUSTY-Y-Y!” the old Scout said. “I used to be able to get him just by goin’ over his head. Whew! Forgot how hard this was! Kinda fun, though, right? You okay?”  
“Yeah,” the Scout said, his mouth dry. 

“Holy shit, man! The Sniper, he--”  
“Yeah, I know,” the original Scout said. “I got a bad habit a’ runnin’ in straight lines. Least he didn’t kneecap me this time.”  
“You--you’re still alive!” the Scout said, next.  
The other Scout patted his own chest a couple times. “Yeah, sure seems that way. Why, what were you expectin’?”  
“I--I dunno! Geeze, I been here for like two years! How--how long is your, uh, stuff stored in the Respawn system?”   
The older Scout shrugged. “I dunno. I always figured it was off when you got out of range, and on when you got back in range. Like a radio frequency or somethin’.”  
“Oh.” the Scout said.  
They stared at each other a long moment, before there was the loud pop-and-whirr of someone else being reassembled molecule by molecule in Respawn--this time the Heavy, looking dizzy. 

The Demoman’s voice, then.  
“Yer sure we cannae convince you to come back? Even for one term?”  
“No, no,” the old Scout, laughing. “I did my time, got my money. It was fun ‘n’ all, but you only go around once, you know? Might as well do what I want, now I’ve got money for it.”  
The Demoman chuckled ruefully. “That I can understand.”  
They drank for a moment in silence, the only things leaving the kitchen being the quiet sounds of liquid sloshing in a bottle and the sharper, barely-muted clink of ice cubes against glass.   
Then the old Scout’s voice again. “I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt, comin’ home an’ seein’ shit barely changed, though.”  
The Demoman made a noise of assent.   
The Scout squirmed slightly, barely breathing.   
The old Scout laughed a little, the sound bitter and sad. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to stay no more, though, I can tell you that. Don’t matter how good you are with a baseball bat or a guitar or a piano, if nobody’ll let you on they field or they stage.”  
“Ye did good work with the Builder’s League, lad.” the Demoman said. His voice was sober and a little sad.   
“Yeah, but what kinda work? The kind I can’t even tell nobody about? Letters goin’ home to my ma and aunties all blacked out and chopped up ‘cause the company censors got at ‘em? An’ a side career? Please. I know the kind of shit they do if you make somethin’ original while you’re workin’ for ‘em. You all must’a thought I was just a kid, but i know why the Engineer’s stuck workin’ for the Builder’s League, and it AIN’T company loyalty.”  
Silence. Clink of ice and sloshing liquor.  
Then, “I liked the job okay, though. Y’all was good men.” he paused. “MOST of y’all.”  
The Demoman laughed again.  
The old Scout continued, “I’m glad I got to travel so much, but I do the same now. If I get tired of wherever I am, HEY! It ain’t no big deal, ‘cause I know I ain’t gonna be there for but a week or two. Actually, I’m pretty sure working for the League is what got me hooked on traveling in the first place. And lucky me, Europeans is crazy for that rock n’ roll and blues, and here I am, with my guitar, and there they are, with big-ass piles of money, just waitin’ to hand ‘em to me for a few songs!”  
The Demoman said something low, but the Scout couldn’t hear because someoen was shifting in their chair.  
He heard a noise that sounded like a door opening and flinched, whipping hs head around to look over his shoulder.  
There was no one there. The corridor was completely silent.  
Far away, somewhere else in the base, a door banged shut. He could hear footsteps outside on the snow.   
The old Scout continued, “When I left, there wasn’t a music hall in America that wanted a black musician onstage. I come back and they’re the same way, except now they’ll let you on the stage, but they’ll make you come in through a back door that opens onto an alley that stinks like stray cat piss an’ rotten garbage an’ shit, an’ the second you finish your set they want you outta there. Fuckin’ unbelievable. What I SHOULD’A done was stayed my ass in Europe.”


	12. Spy/Scout Fuckery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i still don't have a beta reader! also this is unfinished and super-rough. 
> 
> Spy/Scout, NOT incest. This was written literally years before Expiration Date or Blood in the Water. I do NOT headcanon the RED Spy as the RED Scout’s father, and this was not intended to be incestuous.  
> As it stands, however, since the canon itself is...uneven, having previously hinted at the RED Spy being the BLU Scout’s father, but then having both the Scouts have memories of events that happened to each other...along with the Soldiers of both teams appearing to have had multiple jobs and a lot of overlap as well...it is difficult, at best, to delineate who is who. Best to err on the side of caution, however. The BLU Spy is NOT the BLU Scout’s dad. 
> 
> Okay, go on and read it, if you're still here.

"Garcon, if you do not stop glaring at every person who passes, people are going to start to notice you," the Spy said.  
He was sitting opposite the Scout, a newspaper open in front of him. The Scout didn't know how he could do something so completely mundane in settings like this.

They were sitting at a restaurant somewhere--he didn't know--they were somewhere in Italy or France. Maybe Greece, he thought. Traveling with the Spy had left him in a semi-permanent state of confusion, but he had what he liked to think of as an alleycat mentality, which was: land on your feet wherever you fall; hit them before they hit you; run first, fight later; and last, but not least--don't get caught.  
He was feeling VERY caught right now.  
"You sayin' I'm forgettable?" he asked, crossing his arms.

The Spy shot him an unreadable look and shook his head, smirking.  
He went back to glaring around, at the rich people in nice clothes sitting down and eating their fancy lunches all around them. 

He stuck out like a sore thumb, and knew it. Even though he was wearing his nicest clothes--white button-up that was only SLIGHTLY bluish from being washed with too many blue items, a navy-colored knit vest, and a pair of gray slacks over the only pair of Oxfords he owned. HE thought he looked like a really dorky bank teller, but, well, the Spy had asked him to come with him on an assigmnent, and had told him to dress nice.  
So there he was.

The restaurant was one of those places with pressed white tablecloths and big white plates and waiters who didn't make banter, only agreed to everything you said with little nods of approval. Places where they showed you the wine for you to inspect before even pouring it, and there were no prices on the menu.  
Places the Scout didn't belong.

He shifted again on the chair--a fancy, flimsy folding wooden one that was STILL probably stupidly expensive, and he tried not to jog his legs. His knees were indenting the side of the white table-cloth, which was starched so stiff it looked like it'd be able to stand on its own without the table underneath it. He kept twitching and looking down, expecting to see something brushing up against his ankle, only to realize it was the tablecloth.  
He felt like a huge rube.

The waiter appeared like smoke a moment later, and stood beside the table silently, his hands folded behind him. The Scout watching as the Spy ordered some wine, waving away the menus and ordering something from memory instead. Or maybe he was just making it up; the Scout didn't know how things went at these places. Would they make anything you asked for?  
He didn't know, but he figured he'd find out. 

"Hey," he said, leaning back in his chair. "Tell 'em I want a steak, medium."  
The Spy gave him a look and nodded minutely. He finished talking to the waiter, who BOWED--as in, really bent at the waist and ducked his head and everything--before sweeping away.

"You totally ordered me, like, snails and pig brains'n'shit, with a side of poison, didn't you?" the Scout asked. He took a gulp of the water in the glass already on the table.  
"Don't be ridiculous, garcon," the Spy said. "If I wanted you dead, I would have killed you on the plane and left your corpse propped in your seat for the stewardesses to find."  
"Well, that makes me feel just GREAT," the Scout said. "So, you decided you don’t wanna kill me. YET. Does that mean we’re gonna talk about what we're doing now, or what?"  
The Spy gave him a look--amused and calculating all at once. "Not just yet," he said.

While they were waiting for the food to get there, the waiter reappeared with a small basket of breadsticks and a tiny bowl of oil. They were studded with little seeds, and the Spy broke his off into smallish pieces and dipped them into the little bowl of oil on the table as he ate them. The oil was flecked with what looked like little bits of dried leaves and big chunks of coarsely-ground black pepper. The Scout wrinkled his nose.

"How do you know you do not like it, if you refuse to even try it?" the Spy asked, twirling a breadstick between two fingers.  
"’Cuz I don't wanna eat cooking grease with my bread, okay? Jeeze, what, they can't give a guy cup'a pizza sauce to dip his breadsticks in, like at Giannelli's?"

The Spy's face was completely flat for a moment before he snickered into his hand, shifting in his seat. "I will pretend you did not just refer to herb-seasoned virgin Spanish olive oil as 'cooking grease', if you say the name of that no-doubt-delightful pizzeria again."

"What?" the Scout said, screwing up his face. "It's Italian! An' I say it the same way old man Giannelli says it, so you can't tell me I'm sayin' it wrong or nothin'!"  
"Junn-ell-ee's," the Spy repeated, his eyes gleaming. His smile was startlingly genuine. "How profoundly American."

The Scout bristled at the mockery. "Don't be such an asshole, man. Just remember, you asked for my help, an' I was nice enough to say yes, even though YOU ain't even told me what we're here for. Prolly 'cause everyone else knows you'd just backstab 'em afterwards--or during--and I was the only guy nice enough to go with you anyway."  
The Spy chuckled again. "To tell the truth, I never asked anyone else."  
The Scout was floored, but scrambled to cover it.

"'Cause I was the best choice for the job, obviously," he said, to fill the uncomfortable silence. He took a gulp from the glass of ice-water at his elbow.

The Spy had his elbows on the armrests of this chair and had sort of...draped one of his hands on top of the other, at about chest level. From the way he was sitting, the sleeves of his suit rode up, revealing a thin margin of olive-complexioned skin between the cuffs of his sleeves and the gloves, the skin dusted with a fringe of fine black hair.  
He had a sudden realization that he'd never actually seen the Spy without his gloves. 

"You were my ONLY choice," the Spy said, after a long, long moment, and the Scout didn't know why the expression on his face--the weird thoughtful, almost blank expression--made his skin feel suddenly tingly. His mind snapped back into the present; he blinked a few times and hoped, absently, that he hadn't had a stupid look on his face or anything.  
He could feel sweat making his armpits prickly. 

Before he had time to drain the glass of water or choke on it or say anything else stupid, the waiter reappeared with their food.

The Spy had ordered what looked like a slab of pink fish drizzled with white sauce that had green flecks in it. It was perched on top of some long things that looked like the mutant children of a bunch of celery and a box of paintbrushes. 

The Scout watched as he nodded and thanked the waiter, who showed the food to him--god, how weird--with a little dramatic flourish of the plate, sweeping off the little metal dome-cover-thing, just like in the cartoons.

"What the hell is this?" the Scout asked, when the waiter set a plate in front of him and did the same thing.  
"Steak," the Spy said. "I would not try to feed you anything you would make too much of a scene over."

The 'steak' was three medallions of meat, each as thick and round as a biscuit, with a faint char on them. The sides were still a wet, almost lascivious pink, shocking and bright against the dark green of the few leaves of lettuce they were pillowed on. Beside the steaks, mercifully recognizable, there was a little cluster of potatoes, sliced into rounds almost as thin as chips, browned on their edges and weeping buttery sauce onto the bed of lettuce the meat was resting on.

"Seriously, Spy? These are, like, the size'a slider patties. Where the hell's the rest'a the meat? Do I get buns and cheese with these?" he asked. He started to pick the plate up to look underneath it, as a joke, until the Spy said, "That is filet mignon, garcon."  
And he figured, Shit, it MUST be fancy, it even had a stupidly-frilly-sounding Frenchy name. 

"Try it," the Spy said. The way he was looking at the Scout--like HE was the hungry one, even though the Scout realized he'd only seen the man eat, like, five times, which was a weird thought, since he'd worked with him for years--the Scout figured it was probably a warning he should take.  
But he was never good at following warnings.

"This ain't, like, horse or nothin', is it? I know you fro--er, French people like to eat weird shit!" he asked, a final time.  
The Spy snorted softly. "Cheval, prepared properly, is a delicacy. One I would not waste on someone who does not know what filet mignon is."  
The Scout scoffed. "Yeah, whatever. This STILL better not be horse or nothin'."

He picked up his knife and his fork--there were only one of each, thankfully--and sliced off a chunk of one of the steaks. The little medallion of flesh wept pinkish juices onto the plate as his knife parted it, and it was still a little floppy when he picked it up.  
He made a face. "Wow, really? It's, like, still all bloody."

"Do not tell me you are suddenly squeamish. You! I have seen you literally bat people's teeth out of their heads, and laugh and taunt them while you do it. Such a tiny amount of blood as that, suddenly putting you off your lunch?" the Spy asked. 

His tone of voice was completely different, too--lighter, like there was a joke whose punchline the Scout didn't know yet. 

"Do you want it, or not?" the Spy asked, and quirked an eyebrow. "If you do not like it, I suppose we could order something you recognize. I will have to apologize to the chef afterwards, but I am sure he could prepare some 'chicken fingers' for you, if you would rather."

And the Scout knew a challenge when he saw one.  
"I ain't scared, if that's what you're tryin'a say," he said.

"I? Imply something so scandalous? Why, never," the Spy said, in the kind of fake-incredulous tones his ma's gossipy friends used when they were being sarcastic about something.

The Scout scowled and stuffed the piece of bloody meat into his mouth.  
And chewed. And chewed.  
And felt the scowl completely melt away as the meat's mellow, thick tang filled his mouth, salt-savory and perfect.  
"Mmmuh," he managed. He may have dropped his fork to absently reach up and touch his lips. 

"Indeed," the Spy said, still amused, and took a bite of his fish. At another gesture, the waiter was pouring them wine, the stuff in the Scout's glass so red it was almost black, and something was up--something was seriously fishy--but he figured he had time to finish the unbelievably good steak before he had to deal with whatever it was.

~

"If you wanted me to be a poison-test-guinea pig or whatever," the Scout said, "You should'a paid me up front. An' shouldn'a you'a given me some'a your food? Am I gonna die?" he asked. "Sure was a helluva way to go. What'd you say that was? Flay min-yon? Wow. What kinda wine was that? What’d you say it was? Was the poison in the wine?"  
The Spy chuckled. He was doing that a lot lately, and the Scout was finding it less creepy and more...almost-nice. Mostly because, at least right now, when the Spy laughed, it was right before he did something really weirdly nice.

"Non, garcon. If I wanted you dead, there are far easier ways than by spending money to feed you a lavish lunch, and then spoiling it with poison." he paused, and the Scout knew he was drunk--not hammered-drunk, but tingly-all-over drunk, let's-feel-each-other-up drunk. He knew this because the Spy's arm around his shoulders was completely unnecessary, but he was letting the older man steer him back to the car, grinning and boozy-breathed and stopping himself just shy of copping a feel, of full-on rubbing against the older man.

They were in public. That was the kind of thing two guys could only get away with on base, when there weren't other people around. Or only other guys who knew you and felt the same way.

The thought was sobering, so much so that his face fell, and he actually pulled away from the Spy.  
Who stopped walking to turn and look at him.

"Scout? Are you all right?"  
"...Yeah," he said. "I just..." he trailed off, then tried again, "S'nothing, s'nothing. Sorry. Where're we goin'?" 

And if he couldn't stop himself from bumping shoulders and arms with Spy--if he sometimes bumped into him and had to take a minute to get his feet back under himself--well, it was the early evening, and who could fault a guy for drinking a little and weaving when he walked?

~

The hotel was nice. There were dark wooden pillars, and walls covered with pale pink wallpaper behind white marble statues of half-naked chicks with sad faces and bedsheets draped around their hips. There were giant potted trees in every corner, and a red rectangle of carpet, woven with an intricate Oriental design, sprawled over the floor.

For the rest of his life, he would remember restlessly waiting there, leaned against the front desk, jogging his leg up and down rapidly. The concierge was talking on the telephone, which was this absolutely ANCIENT thing that looked like it was from the freaking 1920s, and he kept cutting his eyes at the Scout, giving him these dirty looks so obvious the Scout actually sneered and flipped him off.

He looked away and went back to jogging his leg, staring around at all the plants, at all the rich people in expensive clothes as they came sweeping down the staircase and out the doors, past the white-gloved doorman dressed like a circus ringleader in burgundy tailcoat with white and gold trim.

He started jogging his leg faster, absently, wondering what they were going to do the next day--what they were going to do that night, since of course the Spy hadn't actually TOLD him anything, and the buzz was just starting to wear off, and his legs were starting to ITCH from standing so still, even though he was moving one of them--  
Until the Spy very gently dropped his hand on top of the Scout's wrist, and gave him a Look.

It was not a Stop That look. It wasn't even a You're Being Annoying look. He wouldn't find out what kind of look it was, exactly, until days later.

~

“Now that we are finally alone and you have eaten--and are less likely to, as you say ‘tune out’ in the middle of the conversation--I have a proposition for you.”  
The Scout scoffed. “It ain’t like i can really say no, can I? I mean, you kinda, yanno, dragged me to Europe with you. I ain’t even sure what country we’re in.”

The Spy gave him a strange look, then shook his head. “Scout, I told you we were in France. Your plane ticket home is in your suitcase, inside the lining on the left-hand side, just beneath the manufacturer’s label. If you wish to leave,” he added.  
The Scout sat up straighter, looking up at the older man.  
“Wh-huh? Seriously? You--you’d just...let me...?”

The Spy waved one hand as if fanning away a bad smell. “This is not official company business. Also, as you will have noticed, we do not have the Medic with us, to help us along if things get...complicated. As they may.”  
The Scout was silent a moment, chewing on the Spy’s words, before he ventured, “...Complicated...how?”  
“Complicated as in, people may be shooting at us.”

The Scout guffawwed, slapping his knee. “I KNEW it! This is a heist, ain’t it? What are we takin’? We gonna rob a bank or somethin’? Maybe steal some jewels from somewhere? Oh MAN, so freakin’ COOL, I wish i could tell my brothers, they’d freakin’ crap themselves, they’d be so freakin’ jealous--”

The Spy sighed, rolling his eyes. “It is not a ‘heist’, and for pity’s sake, I am not some idle larcenist out to steal jewels, either for my private ego-masturbatory purposes or a non-company contract.”  
“Aw! Then what the hell gives, Spy?” he asked.

The Spy straightened his back slightly, and gave the Scout a steely look, before asking, “What is it that we capture the other teams’ briefcase for, Scout?”  
The Scout stared for a minute, then scratched his arm. “Uh. The, um. The files that are inside’a it? I dunno, you guys never let me around when you got it open an’ you’re going through it, so--”  
“The Intelligence, Scout,” the Spy said, patiently. 

The Scout wrinkled his nose. “I thought you said this wasn’t official team business!”  
“Because it is not,” the Spy said. “I am gathering intelligence...of a different kind.”  
“Intelligence?” the Scout asked.  
“Yes,” the Spy said.  
And that was all.  
(As if that explained anything, the Scout thought. But he figured he wouldn’t press it just yet.) 

~

He couldn't sleep.  
He wasn't the kind of guy who could just lie there and psych himself into unconsciousness, either; so he kept tossing and turning, making all kinds of noises under his breath.  
Finally, he shoved off the coverlet and sat up.

The room was pitch-black, that strange velvety darkness only ever encountered in hotel rooms, where the air is still and full of muted smells and sounds.  
"Spy? You awake?"  
Silence.  
"Ugh. Of course you're asleep."  
Silence.  
"You'd better not have freakin' abandoned me. You hear me? I freakin' BETTER not be talkin' to an empty room!"  
Silence.

He started to panic, needles of nervousness all in his armpits and in his joints. He started to kick off the sheets, and felt a weight holding them down, then noticed the dip in the mattress.  
He jerked back, swinging. His fist didn't connect with anything, though there was a slide of cloth past his arm.  
"Spy! Shit! FUCK! SPY! HEY--"  
A hand on his wrist, suddenly, then, "Scout, stop shouting. It is me."

He had enough time to suck in two huge breaths, and then he jerked his hand out of the Spy's grip and leaned back to flail around until he felt the lamp's pull cord.  
In the sudden, low yellow light, he saw the Spy was leaning over his bed, one knee on the mattress. The night-shirt of his black pajamas was unbuttoned halfway down, revealing more skin, a chevron of wispy dark chest hair and a surprisingly toned chest. 

"I was just coming to your aid, garcon," the Spy said, feigning hurt. "Since you are apparently unable to cope with the darkness on your own."  
He took another swing at the man, swearing. "Fuck you! I ain't scared'a the dark! I thought you freakin' left!"  
The Spy was giving him another weird look. "And why would I do that?"

The Scout stuck out his hands, palms up, in a what-the-fuck gesture. "'Cause you're the Spy and you're a creep and it's your JOB to...to..."  
The Spy cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. "To...what, Scout? What have I done to arouse your suspicion?"  
"Wha--huh? Hey, no, you ain't done nothin' to arouse nothin' a'mine, man, you're just creepin' me out with the food an' the sneakin' around--"

The Spy chuckled. "Garcon, if I were trying to sneak anywhere, I assure you, I would not invite you to come with me."  
The Scout frowned. "Then why the hell did you ask me to come help you? Are you--are you gonna pull some heist, then set me up to take the fall for it? You are! You BASTARD!" 

He kicked loose of the blankets and swung at the Spy again in the same motion, but the Spy was faster than he expected; being slick and not getting hit were part of his job, after all, though, so of course he was really good at dodging punches.  
That, or the Scout just wasn't as good at punching things as he thought he was--but there was no way THAT was true. 

"Scout," the Spy said, after dodging the third punch, "Scout, I am growing tired of this game!"  
And then he was on him, grabbing for his wrists, and whatever the hell he was doing, it wasn't quite wrestling, because the Scout was used to wrestling with his brothers and forever weaseling out of whatever kind of hold they managed to catch him in--

His face met the side of the bed. Hard. One of his arms was still flailing around, scrabbling behind him, trying to get at the Spy any way he could, while he kicked hard with his feet, but the Spy had his other arm torqued up behind him in a way that said he wasn't going anywhere. The older man's weight was heavy, stretched across his back, his legs pinning Scout's down at the knees. 

"Scout, garcon, stop! Mon dieu, if I had any idea this was going to be so much TROUBLE--" the Spy muttered. His breath puffing hot against the Scout's ear, the side of his face.  
"What--are you--gonna--do to me?" the Scout grunted.  
"I WAS going to ask if you'd like to have sex," the Spy muttered. "Now, I rather want to just go for a walk someplace nice and cool, and have a cigarette."

The Scout went absolutely limp, his breathing shallow. Suddenly the Spy's weight across his back was hot, excitement of a different kind prickling his belly. Not-quite-relief and nervous anticipation clashed in his mind.

He felt the Spy start to relax, too. After a moment, he elbowed where he knew the Spy's side would be, was rewarded when the man grunted softly.  
"Lemme up," he mumbled. When the Spy sat back and he rolled over, he rubbed his twisted arm and grimaced. 

He looked back up into the Spy's face and then jerked his chin at him. He meant to say, 'I don't talk about fucking with people I can't see'.  
Instead he ended up blurting out, "How the fuck did you DO that so fast?"

And then the Spy grinned at him, a real, prideful unfurling, and he held out his hands.  
"Judo. I have been studying the art for quite some time...I so rarely have a chance to indulge."  
"Helluva fancy name for wrestling," the Scout mumbled. He stretched his arm.  
When he looked back over at the Spy, the older man was still smirking at him, amused.  
"What?"  
"Hold up your arms again, garcon..." he said.

So they wrestled for awhile, the Spy demanding, occasionally, for the Scout to demonstrate the hold he'd just showed him, until he had it down right--until he managed to pin the Spy and sat up crowing, and the Spy slid out from underneath him like water, like he hadn't even gotten him down.

"Aww, what? Did I do it wrong?"  
"No. But I can feel a certain part of you is even more exhilirated by all this rolling around than the rest of you." he said.  
And laughed when the Scout looked down at the smallish chub he had in his boxers.  
"H-Hey! I just--I ain't--I--"

"Hush," the Spy said, leaning close. "Don't make me retract my previous thought that you are attractive when rumpled."  
The Scout froze. "You--you really did all that 'cause you think I'm hot when I'm all bothered?"

"Oui," the Spy said, sliding closer. He slid his hand up the Scout's thigh, the leather of his glove supple and cool through the Scout's boxers, and the Scout sucked in a huge shuddering breath, but as the Spy was leaning in for a kiss, the Scout turned his head and blurted, "No, man. I mean--you invited me to Europe and shit. Seriously? 'Cause I mean, we could'a gone to Vegas, seen some...shows..." he trailed off; the Spy was withdrawing a little, studying his gloves.

When it became obvious that he wasn't going to make another move, the Scout nudged him with his knee.  
"Hey," he said, "You never answered my question!"  
The Spy snorted quietly. The Scout realized he was actually laughing. "Questions! I have one for you: do you want to do this, or not?"

The Scout stared at him, hard, trying to read the Spy and knowing he wasn't going to be able to.  
But his hand was still beside the Scout's thigh, his fingers in the supple leather gloves indenting the soft mattress, his unbuttoned shirt fanning his smell forward and at the Scout. 

The Scout’s mouth was dry, the side of his face felt slightly, pleasantly scraped, and his heart was still pounding from earlier. If he shifted the wrong way, the seam of his sleeping shorts would start cutting into his dick.

When he continued to hesitate, the Spy quirked his eyebrow, and sat back.  
"Or we can go back to rolling around on the bed like a pair of hormonal teenagers, with you trying to pin me down," the Spy said, shrugging fluidly. "You did seem to enjoy that."

The Scout made up his mind in a hurry, as he watched the Spy feign interest in the stitcing on the backs of his gloves.

"Yeah," the Scout said. He grabbed the Spy before the man had a chance to ask him what, exactly, he was agreeing to.

<>>

His first thought was that the Spy was a really good kisser.  
...In the back of his mind, he figured the Spy was probably freaky good at kissing because he had to do it all the time, to seduce people so he could steal their secret shit or whatever.  
Which just made him wonder why the Spy was bothering kissing him, because the guy HAD to know the Scout didn’t have any secrets. None worth the attention of a world-class spy, anyway.

<>  
~

 

The Scout thought about this, lying in bed, with the Spy sleeping next to him.  
He knew the Spy was out of his league; guys that smart and that suave didn't go for loud-mouthed street kids from Boston. The guy was definitely just playing with him; the only question was WHY.  
He rolled onto his side, facing away from the window. 

He could have picked anybody, the Scout knew. The Engineer, the Sniper, anybody on the team--hell, anybody on the OTHER team, since the guy seemed to enjoy doing things that could get a guy into a helluva lot of trouble, if he got caught.  
But he’d picked the Scout. 

He sighed, and caught himself trying to fiddle with his hand-bandages. But they were gone, a casualty to Spy’s demands that he Dress Nice. Suddenly he felt very naked and exposed, though he’d hastily redressed while the Spy was in the bathroom afterwards.  
He had nothing to fiddle with to keep his mind occupied.

His hand drifted to the edge of the sheet, which he began slowly running his stubby bitten-down thumbnail over, again and again.  
Why HIM? What was he even doing that he needed the Scout’s help?

Maybe, the Scout thought, he just wanted a vacation, and the guy was too cheap to hire a hooker. Were there guy hookers? He assumed there were, if more than half of the RED team’s preferences were anything to go by. There were probably plenty of guys who weren’t lucky enough to land a job that didn’t involve either being shot or shooting other guys, or who’d flunked out of the Army. And it wasn’t like you could just go down to an aid office and ask for any help finding a job, because if you did, God help you--the draft board would be all over you like a cheap suit before you even had time to turn around good. And he figured, if sex was the last thing desperate girls sold, maybe it wasn’t too different for guys...

But none of these thoughts were making him feel any better.  
Nothing explained why, out of all the other guys he was sure the Spy got along with better, he’d chosen him.

The nagging thought that the Spy just wanted a constant, easy lay kept coming up. (Also free! Unless you counted the meals, which the Scout didn’t.) And he wouldn’t tell him a damn thing about what they were doing, which meant that for all he knew, the Spy really WAS just wasting time, dragging him from nice hotel to nice hotel to fuck him on the fancy mattresses and extra-soft, not-mangled-by-a-Mann-Company-dryer sheets. 

He figured that if the Spy was going to play with him, he might as well just play right back; maybe the older man would buy him expensive stuff, maybe take him to some more nice restaurants.

But the Scout just ended up really hoping that he was going to get more out of this trip than lazy handjob-and-macking-sessions at dawn.  


~

"Not the double-breasted one; you are entirely too young for that cut. Here," the Spy said. He made a disapproving noise, and the little tailor-guy kind of scuttled forward, sweeping the jacket off the Scout's shoulders before he could even say anything. He disappeared into the back, equally as fast.  
"Don't I get any say in this?" the Scout asked, affronted. 

The Spy gave him an amused look. "What is my suit made of? If you can tell me, I will allow you to pick any article of clothing in this store and I will buy it for you without so much as a murmur."  
The Scout's eyes bugged.  
"Seriously?"  
"Oui."

There were no price-tags on anything, and if he knew anything about stores that did that, it was that everything was EXPENSIVE. 

He kept eyeballing this really nice vest, this wine-red color with a black satin back and tortoiseshell buttons--way too nice to wear during matches, but he figured that if Spy could run around in a suit, he could find a way to run around in a vest. 

"Silk, or something." the Scout hazarded.  
The Spy chuckled, shaking his head. "Silk," he repeated.  
"Yeah! ...What?"  
"It is made of merino crepe."  
"...That's a kind of silk, right?"  
"Merino is a type of wool, garcon. Crepe refers to the weave."

The Scout wrinkled his nose. "Wool? Seriously? How the hell are you runnin' around in it 'n' shit n' not, like, sweatin' yourself to death?"  
"There are as many different materials to make suits as there are trees in the forest. When we go to bases in warmer areas, I have suits made of lighter fabrics." the Spy said this while absently fingering the lapels on a row of suits hanging on a rack, white threads still tacking lapels in place. 

The Scout snorted. "I should'a figured. I ain't gonna make fun of ya like the Soldier might, or whatever, 'cause I'll tell ya the truth--I think suits are kinda cool, you know, not to run around in, but they look nice'n'stuff, if you're going somewhere nice. Anyway, I LIKE suits with two rows'a'buttons. They look cool, like the gangsters in the twenties'n'stuff, like Al Capone an' Bonnie'n'Clyde."

The Spy surprised him by chuckling. "Alors! Well. If you behave, I may indulge you."  
The little tailor guy reappeared a moment later, with the little tape flapping around his neck.

"Now," the Spy said, "I want something with the trousers cut very snugly--something to show off these LEGS, you see..." and his hands ghosted down the Scout's thigh, the phantom of a touch. For all of two seconds the Scout felt stupid for wanting to lean into it.  
One look at the Spy's face told him it was perfectly intentional. 

"But I am going to need it to have more generous arm-holes. Cotton, or perhaps linen, because he sweats like a race-horse; partial lining, just the sleeves, for ease of motion. A French cut, not one of those grotesque flapping American bags, or those boxy English monstrosities..."

And he rattled off more and more things, the little tailor scribbling things on a yellow clerk's notepad, nodding at everything the Spy said.

The Spy glanced at him once, appraising him, and the Scout straightened up a little, wihtout thinking about it; the Spy's eyes traveled slow over his body.  
Then the little guy was measuring him with the tape, poking him here and there, nodding his head at what the Spy was saying, pausing to jot things down on the pad again. 

Most of what he said went right over the Scout's head, but after a moment he left, and came back with a white shirt, folded up so perfectly it looked like a picture.  
He held it out to him, gesturing, silently, and the Spy took it from him and handed it to the Scout.  
"Try this on."

So the Scout went into the dressing room--all paneled in satiny dark wood and with a little leather-upholstered stool in one corner--and he shucked off his own bluish button-up shirt, wadded it up, and dropped it on the stool.

He hadn’t expected Europe to be so much cooler than the States, and he usually didn’t wear undershirts anyway, not unless they were stationed at a base somewhere cold--but it seemed weird to put on a shirt that nice when he’d been walking around and sweating all day. Was this a rental place? Was he going to have to bring it back later?  
But then, he thought, why would the guy be making him something from scratch?  
He shook his head, sighing, and pulled the new shirt on.

The new shirt was soft and cool and supple as butter against his skin, so white in the dim light that it almost glowed. He fussed with the cuff buttons for a moment, before giving up and stepping out of the dressing room.

"Whaddaya think?" he held his arms wide, and felt very cocksure for the two seconds before the Spy stepped up closer to him.  
"Very nice," he said. "You clean up admirably well, Scout."  
"Whaddaya mean 'clean up'? I look good all the time, and you know it! All this extra's like puttin' gold shoes on a racehorse."

The Spy looked amused as he buttoned the cuff buttons, and then adjusted the collar, tugging the collar's tips more roughly than, perhaps, was strictly necessary. The Scout rocked slightly on his feet. 

"Yes," the Spy murmured, close enough to the Scout that he could feel his breath. "But you do not always look like this," he said. 

He stepped aside and the Scout had a view of himself in the mirror, the shirt hugging him like a second skin, and this was completely different from the baggy, vaguely misshapen things he was used to getting third-hand from his brothers or thrift shops.  
He took a breath and the way the fabric brushed his skin as his chest swelled was felt weirdly good.

The Spy made a soft, pleased noise, and took one of his hands in his own. “The look would be completed,” he murmured, “If you would abandon these...”  
So saying, he unwound the Scout’s knuckle tape, his hands warm through the glove. The Scout would remember, later, how strange, how perfectly smooth the leather of the older man’s gloves was, against his skin.

At the time he blushed a little, bit the inside of his lip, and tried not to say anything stupid.  
The Spy repeated this with the other hand, and held them out with a gesture. 

The tailor guy scuttled forward and took them away; the Scout hardly noticed, though. He was still staring at himself in the mirror, brushing his hands over the shirt’s cloudy-soft material.

“You like it,” the Spy said, sounding amused.  
The Scout scoffed a little, pretended to straighten it out, tugging on the hem.  
"...Yeah, it's all right."  
The Spy laughed. "It's all right, he says. It is brushed cotton sateen. It is more than all right! We will take three." His eyes met Scout's in the mirror. "Non, pardon. Make that four."

They left the shop with the Scout carrying the bags--the Spy had bought something for himself that the Scout hadn’t seen--with the expensive laminated paper slapping against his calves. The whole way back to the hotel, the Scout kept deliberately squashing any feelings of excitement or happiness that struck him.

Once they were back in the room, though, he tossed the bags onto the bed and whirled to face the Spy.  
It would have been great if he’d thought he’d be okay doing something dramatic like running over and planting a big wet one on the guy; but it also struck him that, out of all the guys--who he’d playfully elbow in the hallways, or tell dirty jokes to, or show his especially funny doodles--the Spy wasn’t one of them.  
He didn’t actually know how to approach the older man.

The Spy didn’t seem to notice his hesitation, however. He crossed the room, going to the fancy wooden wardrobe they had, because apparently European builders didn’t believe in built-in closets or something, and pulled it open. 

He’d hung his nice black suit there--well, niceness was relative, because ALL the Spy’s clothes looked nice to him; it might have been something cheap, for all the Scout knew--and three or four shirts. He’d actually taken the time to drape his TIES over hangers, for crying out loud. 

For lack of things to do, the Scout sank down on the bed, bracing his arms behind himself so he could recline slightly.  
“So now what’s up?” the Scout asked, after a long moment spent watching the older man undress.  
Slowly. Seriously, why was it taking him so long to get his shirt unbuttoned?

The Spy turned to him, snorting a little. But he was smirking; his tie hung around his neck like a long red tongue, his shirt unbuttoned. He hung it with the others, and the Scout watched him pull his undershirt off in a single fluid motion. In the back of his mind, he thought that if that had been him, he probably would have gotten it caught on his chin or his ears, and spent the next five minutes bent over, cussing and trying to untangle himself.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We’re going out.”  
“What, right now?”  
“It is almost four o’clock,” the Spy said, as if that meant anything.  
“No, I mean--you want me to just--” he stood up and shuffled to one side of the bed, shrugging. “What?”

“Change your clothes. It is a fairly simple operation, I believe,” the Spy said, still smirking. He stepped around to the armchair beside the wardrobe and sank down, crossing his legs leisurely.

The Scout stood there awkwardly for another moment, before picking up one of the bags. He spent ANOTHER awkward moment looking between its contents and the Spy and back again.  
“Wh--really? I--just--here?”  
“Oui? Is something the matter?” the Spy asked him, one eyebrow raised.  
“Can’t I--” he gestured helplessly towards the bathroom. 

The Spy shrugged. “If you would like. I *was* looking forward to getting to see you in those new clothes...” He pretended to pluck lint off the inside of one wrist.  
“All right, fine, I’ll strip. But i ain’t gonna dance or nothin’, so don’t get your hopes up!” he said, with more heat than he felt.  
The Spy still smiled anyway, shaking his head. 

His hands felt damp against his own shirt, his fingers clammy as he untucked it from his pants.  
The Spy watched him impassively for a long moment, shifting only slightly in the chair.  
He shucked out of his shirt and let it fall on the carpet.  
The Spy’s eyes tracked his every motion, minute attentions he honestly wasn’t used to.  
He got his belt undone, the metal buckle clattering softly in his hands, when the Spy made a soft noise.

When he looked up, the older man was beckoning him closer.  
“Uh...?” he began.  
Instead of saying anything else, he sidled closer, his hands still on his belt, feeling half-naked and ridiculous.

...

"You are stunning," the Spy said. His hands hovered just above the Scout's shoulders, traveling in an outline down from his shoulders, to his hips, where he paused.  
The Scout adjusted the cuff of the suit, shivering slightly at the way the shirt seemed whisper-thin against his skin.

"Your guy's real good at sewing, yeah," the Scout said. He kept his voice low, seeming to pick up the mood by osmosis, since the Spy was practically whispering.  
"So are you gonna tell me what all this is for?" he mumbled.

The Spy smirked again, sliding his hands gently--so gently--the same hands he'd seen the Spy stab people with--and he moved them down, smoothing the suit against the Scout's chest.

The Scout inhaled, feeling tingles wash over his skin, the breath bringing him another hard hit of the Spy's smell--expensive cigaretted and even more expensive cologne.  
"You gonna tell me why you dressed me up? Or, lemme guess. 'Not just yet'. Right?"  
The Spy smirked, nodding. "Exactly."

~

So that was how the Scout ended up sitting at the Spy's elbow at a card table in a club somewhere, everyone speaking French and Italian--languages he only even understood because of the Italian family in the apartment next door to his apartment back home, and because the Spy sometimes liked to listen to French records back at their base--feeling inexplicably horny and vaguely kinky in the nice suit, the nice socks silky as a whisper against the legs of the pants. 

Whenever he moved, he had to fight off goosebumps, trembles building in his legs as he felt the pants slide over his skin. Every time he inhaled, the soft material of the undershirt kept brushing against his nipples in a really distracting way that probably shouldn't have been as big a deal to him as it was. He figured that maybe it WASN'T just girls who got off on that, then thought to hismelf that maybe this was the Spy's plan--some ridiculously roundabout way to get into his pants via wining and dining him, buying him nice clothes, and taking him to a club where he wouldn't let him have ANYTHING to drink. 

Not that he would have. There wasn't a beer in sight; everything was bubbly amber-yellow wine in tall glasses glasses, and dark liquor in heavy-bottomed tumblers, over glittering cubes of ice.

The Scout hadn't even known that places like this EXISTED in real life, but he figured that if anyone was going to know about them, it'd have to be the Spy.  
The Spy wasn't drinking, either; he seemed intent on his cards, winning hand over hand.  
The other guys didn't seem too pleased.

Until the Spy lost a hand. Everyone at the table shuffled slightly, the other high-rollers seeming to swell up, the girls hanging off them preening in their fur stoles. 

The Spy slipped his hand over the Scout's knee and looked at him with an ingratiating, almost supplicating look. "Garcon, I forgot my pocketbook in the car. Would you...?"  
And he nodded, understanding he was supposed to be silent. He stood up and went past the stone-faced doorman--resisting the strong urge to stick his tongue out at the guy in favor of pausing in front of him, looking him up and down, and very obviously adjusting the lapels of his new suit, before snickering and jogging down the stairs.

He wended through the club, passing first the card tables, the roulette tables where a man in a canary-yellow suit was whispering something into the ear of this really stacked blonde in an equally-yellow dress, her dress taut over the swell of her ass, and his fingers digging slightly into her thigh. He caught a fleeting glimpse of her slipping her hand into his pocket while she giggled at whatever he’d said. 

He'd just made it to the car and gotten in to open the glove compartment when the Spy was opening the other door, sliding in. The Scout saw him make a minute adjustment to the suit's front panel, and noticed that the top button was undone.

"What did you do?" he asked.  
"Nothing that was not necessary," he said. And then, "Roll up your window."  
And they were pulling off, speeding away down the narrow street.

The Spy parked them in an out-of-the-way alley, where he got out and changed the car's license plates, swapping them out for a new one that he got out of a briefcase. The Scout caught a glimpse of about a half-dozen other plates, all in a neat stack in the case.

When he and the Spy got back into the car, he handed the Scout a hat--a floppy gray newsboy cap--and took off his own tie with a series of quick motions. He started to untie the Scout's tie a moment later, until the Scout flapped his hands away.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy! You got lucky at cards, okay! But I don't wanna make it in a borrowed car in an alley! You can't just--"  
The Spy scoffed at his protests. "Garcon, really. What sort of tacky amateur do you take me for? I am not trying to get you undressed, just CHANGED. Now, unless you want my continued help--which I can see you do not--unbutton the top two buttons of your shirt."  
The Scout gave him a skeptical look that was mostly lost to the darkness in the car.

"What the hell for?"  
"I will explain in due time," the Spy said, and then, since the Scout continued not to move, he slapped his hands away and undid the top two buttons on his shirt, too, and rumpled it a little. The tie went into the backseat with a flick of the Spy's wrist; the older man leaned forward, paused.

"Pardon me, Scout," he said.  
"What the hell for?"  
"For how utterly perfunctory this is," he said, and then kissed him.

The Scout made a noise--part confusion, part excitement, as the Spy ran his hands up under the suit jacket, fingers skimming the Scout's chest and fanning out, the gloves' leather slick over the shirt.  
His nipples peaked up hard, and the Spy let him suck his tongue a moment before pulling away, making a satisfied noise. 

When he went for the Scout's hair, though, rumpling it slightly, the Scout finally had to speak up.  
"Seriously, what the hell is going on?" he asked.

He didn't feel panicked--not really. He realized he was more eager than anything to find out what the hell the Spy was doing.

"Nothing, garcon, nothing. You are doing very well," he added, with a crooked smile.  
The Scout could feel himself still sweating.  
"For real, Spy! Is this a heist or something? Are you not tellin' me 'cause you think I'll squeal? C'mon, man, gimme more credit than that. I ain't a kid! I'd probably be able to actually HELP, if you'd stop keepin' me in the dark."  
"Not just yet," the Spy said.

The Scout slouched back in his seat, scoffing, stuffing his fists into his armpits.  
"Fine, whatever. Don't tell me nothin'. That way when you dump me off somewhere later, NEITHER of us will know what the other guy was thinkin'."  
He paused a moment, pressing his lips together, still feeling the kiss. Then he added, “And quit puttin’ your mouth on me if you ain’t gonna let me in on nothin’.”  
The Spy gave him an unreadable look, but said, “Oui. I apologize.”  
The Scout kicked himself inwardly. He wanted to add, Or at least warn me, but by the time he’d puzzled the thought together, moments had passed. He already felt all over the place, as it was. 

Then the Spy took them out of the city, taking a wending path through back-street after alley after back-street, flicking the car's headlights on and off occasionally to check their location. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, though, and soon they were pulling out past houses behind low walls, and soon the houses fell away to smaller cottages. Soon after that, they were driving down open road with nothing but miles of black around them--black trees sloping down the steep hillside to their left, and black trees to their right drooping their branches low over the road. The moon was high and white in the sky overhead; and the only other things to see were the occasional looming rock or signpost. 

"So are you really not gonna tell me where we're going?"  
"Hush, garcon. You are doing so well; it would not do to--let me borrow a phrase from your charmingly offensive dialect of English--'freak out' and spoil it now." the Spy's voice was excited, almost humorous. 

The Scout realized that this might have just been work, but for the Spy, it was like a game--a really expansive game of hide-and-seek, like he'd heard the guy say. Except, seeing him now, the Scout realized that the Frenchman MEANT it. He was obviously loving every second.

They drove for maybe an hour in silence, the radio only occasionally picking up blips of different stations. Mostly there was soft, quiet static. The Spy must have been keeping them off the main roads, he realized, since in all that time they never passed another car, or even any buildings.

They sped along in the dark, black trees whispering past, the dirt of the narrow road crackling under the car's tires. It started to seem almost soothing, the tension melting away with all the time, and by the time the Scout saw lights on a hill up ahead, he was fighting the urge to nod off.

There was a faint scratching sound--trees' branches on the roof--and then the slight rocking motion as the Spy parked the car and killed the engine.  
The Scout jerked out of an uncertain doze into wakefulness with the Spy's hand shaking his shoulder.  
"C'mon, man, did you really have to drive me all the way out here to Lover's Lookout to feel me up and make out?"

The Spy laughed. "Hardly. Come; we must move, quickly."  
"Gettin' reeeal tired'a scramblin’ just 'cause you say to, with no explanation, Spy," the Scout said. But he got out of the car when the Spy did, and stood beside the little roadster, stretching for a moment, his arms above his head.

He had a brief second to realize what he was doing--in the beautiful suit jacket, which he was probably stretching or wrinkling or something awful, he realized. He dropped his arms and started patting himself down, feeling for tears or popped threads.

He felt the Spy's hand on the small of his back a moment later, and resolutely did NOT jump. The older man handed him one of the suitcases--it didn't feel like the one with all the guns and the gear, judging by its relatively light weight--and they walked down a crumbling stone walkway, under a stone arch covered with swath of ivy. 

The air had a faint salt tang, and it was cool enough that the Scout started to re-button his shirt, until the Spy tutted him, and swatted his hand away.

"I need you to look properly rumpled, garcon, so do please stop trying to straighten yourself up." he said.  
As if that was supposed to explain anything.  
The whole thing was starting to make the Scout's skin itch. 

They were in a courtyard with stone flagstones underfoot, little weeds growing up between the cracks between the flagstones. He followed the Spy up some stone steps to a little wooden door in the side of a white plaster building, where the Spy made quick work of the lock with a lockpicking kit he pulled out of one lapel pocket, as casually as you'd remove an actual key.

The Scout started to feel tense again, wondering if this wasn't someone's house and he wasn't about to kill an entire family with him as a really unfortunate (and unwitting, and also COMPLETELY UNINTENTIONAL accomplice).

Instead, they stepped down into the hallway of what the Scout guessed was a hotel, judging by how many doors there were. It was really quiet; the Scout realized he had no idea what time it was. It might have been right after midnight or right before dawn; it was impossible to tell. 

The Spy came to one of the rooms just down the hall from the door they came through, picked that room's lock, as well. Once they were inside, the Spy locked the door, tossed the suitcase down on the bed, and nodded at the Scout.  
"Stand still," he said. 

He stalked over to the window and pulled the curtains closed, flicked on a light, and then went around the room once, opening the wardrobe and pressing his toes into the corners, brushing a hand through all the drawers, and kneeling, his revolver suddenly in hand, to check under the bed.

After that, he went to the bathroom and checked in there.  
The Scout stood in complete silence, his palm sweating around the suitcase's handle, until finally the Spy came back.

Around him, the room was ridiculously fancy, all dark wood, a deep-pile wine-colored rug sprawling under the bed, the mahogany furniture upholstered in plum-colored plush.  
The Spy had a huge, shit-eating grin on his face. He took the suitcase off the bed, set it beside the nightstand, and then flung himself down backwards, sighing rapturously.

"So, uh. I'm gonna go with that meaning everything's cool?"  
"Oui! Better than that. I do SO love the American penchant for gross understatement; it almost verges on the British."

The Scout walked to beside the bed, put the suitcase down, and stared down at the Spy, who had actually begun to GIGGLE.  
"So what the hell are you so happy about, huh? Wanna finally let me in on somethin'?"  
The Spy rolled off the bed, landing on his knees beside it, and snatched the suitcase.  
Which he popped open to reveal another revolver--this a plain one with a white handle, counterpoint to his fancy engraved one that he'd been using--and two balisongs in neat cases, along with two boxes of bullets. Folded neat underneath these there were more white shirts, more pairs of slacks, underwear and socks rolled into tidy balls.  
"Later. Get changed, garcon."  
The Scout looked down at himself. "Into WHAT? What the hell for?"

The Spy made a tsking noise and stood up, padding silently over to the Scout.  
He went to unbutton the Scout's shirt and the younger man slapped his hands away, taking a step backwards.  
"No way, man! You ain't told me nothin' yet, an' how'm I supposed to know you ain't gonna just fuck me and, I dunno, stick me fulla a syringe of some Spy drugs or some shit, and then leave me here to get caught so's you can escape?" his chest was heaving, the shirt still tickling him in a faintly obscene way. 

He crossed his arms over his chests, stuffing his fists into his armpits, but this only served to worsen the sensation.  
And then of course the Spy was just sort of looming over him, in a way he'd have taken as threatening with literally anyone else--but he was so close he could smell him, could feel the heat coming off him.

"Why would I do that?" the Spy whispered, "When you have done such a good job?"  
"Job? What job? You ain't told me nothin' except that you needed my help."  
"And you have been helping me," the Spy said, almost cajolingly. "And didn't I tell you I would take you around? Hmm? And show you the sights?"

His hands came up slowly to the Scout's arms, and rubbed from his elbows down to his shoulders, and back again, until the Scout relaxed. He hadn't realized how tense he was until the older man began...what was he doing, PETTING him? There wasn't really any other way to describe what he was doing, gloved hands smooth and warm even through the suit and the nice shirt.

His hands relaxed, slipping out of his armpits and falling slowly down to his sides.  
"...Yeah..." he said, grudgingly, but then added, "But you haven't shown me nothin'! All's we did was go to a club where there wasn't even any beer, where YOU did something we had to run away from, and--"

"Scout," the Spy said. "I will explain everything to you. Just...not yet. You have my word. Oui?"  
"'We'? 'We' what?" the Scout said.

Very suddenly one of his hands was on the Scout's jaw, fingertips sleek and smooth in the leather glove. “You are too amusing. Let me kiss you?”  
The Scout's complaints died to a shuddering breath in his throat. 

He mumbled, “Sure, why the hell not,” under his breath, but jostled closer to the Spy, his mouth closing on the older man’s.  
The Spy’s amused chuckle rumbled in his chest, strong enough that the Scout could feel the vibrations in his own ribs.

This time when the Spy kissed him, it was relaxed, slower, his hands moving from the Scout's arms to his chest again. His fingers were so quick on the buttons, the Scout didn't really notice, or feel it, until the Spy was brushing the jacket back off his shoulders. 

"You'd be the most fuckin' amazing kisser if you'd stop suckin' on cigarettes, yanno," the Scout mumbled, his hands sliding up and down the Spy's back, and when he realized that the Spy was LETTING him, he went for it and squeezed the Spy's ass. 

"Would I?" he murmured. He shifted closer to the Scout, pressing his erection against the Scout's hip, against the thickening curve of his own cock, through their pants.  
The older man peeled off layer after expensive layer, letting them pool on the floor around the Scout, and once he had him out of his pants he palmed the Scout's erection through his briefs and made an appreciative noise.  
"So quiet," the Spy remarked.

"Yeah, yanno, I'm still kinda worried about some friends'a yours kickin' in the door and fillin' us fulla bullets, so." he said.  
"Ahh," the Spy said. "Then please, allow me to introduce you to the trick to forgetting worries."

That was how the Scout ended up on his back on the bed, the Spy fucking him between his thighs. He was keeping his legs pressed together, and the Spy was holding his legs up straight. His feet were beside the right side of the older man's head, his toes beside the Spy’s ear. A few bracelets, encrusted with diamonds and sapphires, hung in glinting rings around his ankles. He kept looking between the bracelets and Spy's face, and every now and then the Spy would bite the instep of his foot or kiss his ankle, and he'd flinch a little, and laugh, and right before he came he thought, Yeah. I could probably get used to this.  
_Whatever the hell this is,_ he added later.

 

He woke up the next morning to the sound of the Spy on the phone, speaking in a low, careful voice. Every now and then he’d chuckle a little, the corners of his eyes going all crinkly.

The Scout only spoke English--and he was aware that some of his teammates thought he didn’t even speak THAT very well--but he was around the Spy enough to know that the language he was speaking wasn’t French. For one, everything had a weird upward lilt at the end of it, not like French, which sounded like someone whistling with a mouthful of water, everything smooth and fluid and running together. 

The older man had gone back to his own bed, and the side of the mattress he’d been on last night was completely smoothed down--as if the events of the last night hadn’t even happened.  
He rolled over, blinking, wondering what time it was. 

The Spy had opened the drapes but left the white curtains down, and daylight was streaming in through the window, butter-colored and bright. 

When the Spy saw him, his eyes did the crinkly-at-the-edges thing, and he said a few final words into the phone before laughing some more and then hanging up.  
“Well. Good morning, Scout.”  
“Morning,” the Scout croaked. 

He started to ask what they were going to do that day, but ended up in a coughing fit.  
The Spy stood up and went to the minibar--which the Scout hadn’t even noticed, tucked into a nook in a far corner--and returned with a glass of water.

The Scout took it--stared long and hard at the glass, before sighing. If the Spy was going to kill him, he sure was taking his time with it, he thought, and then downed the glass in a succession of huge gulps.

“What are we doing today?” he said. His voice was still croaky.  
“Pardon?” the Spy asked.  
“What...are...we...doing...today?” he asked again, a bit louder.

“Ah,” the Spy said, then shrugged. “Breakfast in our room...then lunch...then, whatever you’d like,” he said.  
“At this rinky-dink place? Yeah, sure, I bet they got everything,” the Scout said, “a swimming pool, tennis courts, a weight room, the works.” He rolled his eyes.

He stretched his arms out, bracing his hands against the bed’s wooden headboard, the tips of his toes poking out from beneath the sheet at the bottom.  
The Spy, chuckling, drifted over to the window. 

“You may find yourself surprised. I DID let us in through the back door, but I must beg you not to judge the entire place based on the appearance of a disused rear courtyard.”  
So saying, he nodded at the window.

The Scout kicked out of the sheets and coverlet and padded over, rubbing his eyes at the light. (is he still naked here? The BLU Scout is shyer than this and wouldn’t just walk up to a window nude.)  
And stared, agog, at what he saw below. 

There WAS a pool, a huge sapphire-colored ovoid winking back white flashes in the sunlight. A lone woman in a black bathing suit lay in one of the white canvas-and-wood folding chairs scattered around the pool. A gray poodle with a collar glittering with rhinestones lay on a striped navy-and-white towel beside her. 

Here and there, tilted over the reclining chairs, there were big white canvas sun-umbrellas; the far side of the paved area around the pool was bordered by a white marble railing , acting as the bottom frame of a stunning vista of the countryside. White plaster buildings descended in semi-circular rows down the steep hillside, broken here and there with the dark-green, plush tops of trees. 

Down, far in the distance, a crescent of beach with a quay farther out, docks where boats as tiny as his thumbnail were just unfurling their sails. A few were already skimming out into the ocean, a swath of cobalt blue that ran to the unbroken horizon. 

“Holy SHIT,” the Scout whispered, to the tune of the Spy’s low laughter.  
“I thought you would like it.”  
“Where ARE we?” he asked.  
“Mont-Saint-Reimonde. A beach resort,” the Spy said. “What would you like for breakfast?” (apparently that’s the name of a mountain in Chile. Why tho. I FI~IXED IT! Saint Ramon aka Raymond aka Reimonde is the patron saint of keeping secrets. And also of obstetrics. Because those two thing were obviously interrelated in the past, and remain so today.)

“Uh--really?”  
“Oui.” the Spy chuckled. “Really.”

“Uh...two slices of toast, four scrambled eggs, a glass’a’two-percent milk, four slices’a’bacon, can I get strawberry jelly for the toast? Um...oh! Do they got waffles here? ‘Cause I want, like, a shortstack’a’those, too...” he trailed off, ticking things off his fingers.

“Anything else?”  
The Scout frowned, then shrugged, then shook his head. 

He watched as the Spy went back to the phone, lifted it, and then called someone. Whoever it was, his voice was completely different--firm, kind of, but still polite.  
The phone clicked softly back onto the cradle and the Spy stole up beside him.

“If I wanted to touch you,” the older man asked, “Would I have to wrestle you into submission, as on that first night? Or could we conduct ourselves like adults?”  
“You didn’t wrestle me into nothin’, and--and--” he glanced at the window, sidling to the side a little. “Ain’t you scared’a someone seein’ us?”  
“This isn’t America, Scout,” the Spy said. 

His hand, warm through the leather of his glove, warm through the Scout’s nightshirt. He hadn’t realized how cool his own skin was. 

Still, he twitched the drapes closed before turning to face the older man, letting him slip his warm hands over his cheeks, long thin fingers carding through the shorter hairs over the back of his neck. The tingles raced down to his toes.

He’d woken up without any morning wood, but that was something the Spy was rapidly changing, his mouth moving fluid against the Scout’s, his tongue in his mouth. He must not have had a cigarette yet, the Scout thought, but he’d brushed his teeth, because his mouth felt slick. Clean.

His hands were sliding down the Scout’s neck, fingertips dipping below the collar of his pajama shirt. He broke the kiss to suck in a trembling breath.  
“Oui?” the Spy murmured, against his lips.  
“Yeah,” the Scout mumbled. “Yeah...”

His own arms, sliding around the man’s waist, his hands sliding down and palming his ass--which, okay, the Scout didn’t know how old the Spy was, but he had a pretty nice ass, regardless--and feeling the man’s pleased, amused chuckle rumble in both their chests.  
There was a soft, rasping knock at the door.  
The Scout jumped half out of his skin. 

When the Spy went to open the door for the room service people, the Scout flung himself down on his own bed and tried to look innocent. There wasn’t even a book to pretend to read, but he tried his damndest to look busy, staring down at the pillow he’d pulled over his lap.  
His face was burning.

The Spy exchanged a few pleasant words (and probably a lot of money) with whoever delivered their food.

 

And the Spy was thinking thoughts, expansive, smoke-dark thoughts, about undressing the boy and holding him down on the bed, holding that strip of silk like a leash and fucking him until he was boneless and pliant.

 

"Nnn--" the Scout started. "C'mon, gimme a break, man.."  
The Spy looked concerned. "Would you like to stop?"  
"Hell no!" the Scout said, pressing close. "Not after everything. I still wanna fuck, I just..."

"You would prefer to do something else?" the Spy pulled away from him, and the Scout thought of large cats reclining.  
"Naw," he said, "It's just that I hate cigarette-breath."  
The Spy looked away, chuckling but embarrassed. "I am sorry. I could not help myself.”

~

The two guys in black suits flopped over dead, little holes in their temples, and the car swerved violently to the right, slamming into a pillar.  
In the confusion of the resulting explosion, the Spy revved their car, aimed it at the canal--

"What the hell, man! THE FUCKIN' RAVINE! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU--" the Scout called out, before the car went over the edge, and the Spy's grip on his suit lapel was the only thing that pulled him out of the car.

They hit the water before the car hit the wall, horrific metallic crashing noise followed by a colossal splash. Then warm, brackish, gasoline-stinking water washed over them in sluggish waves. 

The Spy yanked him under, and he felt the older man towing him to the shore.  
When they were in the shadow of one of the concrete overpasses, the Spy climbed out of the water and half-pulled him out, coughing and sputtering.

"Well. That was sloppy." the Spy, though slightly out of breath, was perfectly composed.  
"Were you gonna tell me?" the Scout rasped. He rolled over, propped himself upright.  
"Tell you what?" the Spy said. He was panting, too, pulling in hard breaths of air. After a moment, he flicked his wrist sideways and emptied the bullets out of the revolver's chambers, catching them in one hand.  
"That you were using me as bait."

"You were never bait," the Spy said. He turned to him and smiled at him again, that same weird warm smile that made Scout agree to go with him on this whole freak-show trip the whole time  
"You were my disguise. And a better one I have never had."

~

The Spy, his eyes still excited and bright, looked over at the Scout.  
“Garcon,” he said, “Would you like to see the face of your father?”  
The Scout’s own face went slack, then screwed up. “He--I ain’t got a dad. My ma said--”  
“--what any loving mother would have told her son, to protect him from the truth.” the Spy said.  
The Scout started to say something, but just clenched his fists at his sides instead, bristling all over with anger.  
He watched the Spy reach into an inner pocket on his jacket, producing a smallish yellow manila envelope.  
Instead of tossing it down onto the end-table wiht his usual flippancy, he held it out.  
The Scout, figuring it was all a prank, snatched the envelope, flipped it open, and pinched out the small handful of photos that were inside.  
Then he stared down at them, his face creasing into a slow frown.  
“This...that ain’t right, this ain’t my dad. He can’t be.” His voice faltered. He lied, “He doesn’t look nothin’ like me.”  
“I thought you would say that,” the Spy said. “Look at the others.”  
As the Scout flipped through, he started to feel--well, he didn’t know. Cold, a little. The hairs on his arms were all prickly and he had goosebumps, which was weird enough as it was, though he half-expected the whole thing to be a joke.  
But then there was a picture of a young man who might have been his brother, but for the more prominent, aquiline nose. They had the same eyes, slight bags underneath them, the same long face and high forehead. The same eyebrows.  
His stomach dropped slowly.  
“Who...who is he?”  
“Your father,” the Spy said, patiently. “The RED Spy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok seriously is anyone still reading these? anyone?
> 
> :(


	13. He Makes Me Laugh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: this was written literally years before Expiration Date or Blood in the Water. I do NOT headcanon the BLU Spy as the BLU Scout’s father, and this was not intended to be incestuous.   
> As it stands, however, since the canon itself is...uneven, having previously hinted at the RED Spy being the BLU Scout’s father, but then having both the Scouts have memories of events that happened to each other...along with the Soldiers of both teams appearing to have had multiple jobs and a lot of overlap as well...it is difficult, at best, to delineate who is who.   
> STILL NOT INCEST.

“The Scout?” the Engineer said, deadpan. “You’re serious.”  
“Oui,” the Spy murmured. He was looking thoughtfully down at his dagger, the one with the carved mahogany handle that had the mother-of-pearl inlay. He was sitting opposite the Engineer, so the other man had a complete view of the weapons the Spy was pretending to clean.

The Texan scoffed slightly at the Frenchman, who was not cleaning or repairing his weapons so much as looking at them and occasionally caressing them with a bit of chamois. The chamois itself was completely devoid of polish.

“I am surprised you are not going to try to give me the ‘shovel talk’ you Americans are so fond of,” the Spy said, with an arched eyebrow.  
The Engineer stammered a moment. “Wh--now why would I go and do that?”  
“For defiling your precious student, or some other such nonsense,” the Spy continued.  
The Engineer flushed, looked away, and looked back. “Now--jest ‘cause I lent the boy some books, it don’t mean I’m tryin’ ta--”  
“Yes, yes, I know, of course,” the Spy said, in soothing tones, and the Engineer shut his mouth and sighed. He shook his head and went back to his work.

Everyone was too polite to point out that they knew the Spy was just there for the gossip; after all, more than half of them were there for the same reason, too.

The entire team--barring the Scout, who was off in goodness-knew-where doing something that was probably ill-advised, and the Demoman, who was in the kitchen banging away loud enough to wake the dead, making something delicious--was sitting at the two rec room/mess hall tables, which they’d pushed together to make into one long table.

Everyone had something in front of them--a partially-disassembled rifle, a shovel whose spade edge needed re-sharpening, improved teleporter blueprints, a scratchy, very detailed pen-and-ink sketch of a new flamethrower. The Heavy was sitting behind an army of hand-filed bullet casings, humming under his breath as he double-checked for imperfections. He was wearing a pair of jeweler’s spectacles, and looked like the world’s largest, baldest bank teller picking over tubular gold ingots for imperfections.

Beside him, the Medic was frowning down at a lot of white tape with ghostly-pale bluish-purple letters and numbers on it--readouts from a tiny printer housed inside the Medigun, detailing how much healing it had done, and on whom. He was scribbling numbers into a steno pad, and occasionally would pause to tut before resuming his notations. 

It was their weekly weapons-and-tool-cleaning night, which had started when the Engineer, tired of hauling things down to his barn, had simply flung down his armload onto the mess hall table, and sat down to start work there.

But where there was an Engineer, there was a Pyro; they had come in after him, said their hellos, plopped down, and commenced with drawing charcoal sketches of unicorns. They had flames for manes and tails, and were frolicking through a field which they were simultaneously setting ablaze. 

The Engineer had watched his workspace reduced to a two-foot-square area of tabletop, while the Pyro had set to adding exquisite details to everything in their drawing. The trees were made of bubbles and candycanes. 

This would have been wonderful, if they had been doing this on a piece of paper, rather than the tabletop. When the Demoman came in later to announce that dinner was ready, he about flipped his eyepatch to see them. 

The Demoman had chased the Pyro around the room with a half-full bottle of cooking sherry, hollering demands that the firestarter clean off the table for dinner. The ensuing racket--the Pyro running around yelling and laughing, the Demoman running and yelling, both of them upsetting chairs and stumbling into walls--had attracted everyone else.

So it happened that, every Wednesday night, after dinner, they’d all go get their weapons and return, to sit and clean and repair them together. (The Engineer made sure to bring along a roll of butcher paper for when the Pyro wanted to draw instead of working on their weapons. That way, the Demoman stayed in the kitchen--and stayed content--and the Pyro stayed out of trouble.)

“What about the Scout?” the Medic asked. He did not look up from his work.  
“Spy said ‘e was fuckin’ ‘im,” the Sniper said. He was nearly finished with the weapon he was cleaning, shining the scope lens on his newest (and fanciest) gun. It was a large, sleek black rifle that looked like something from a science-fiction film. (Later, when the Spy nonchalantly asked why it was that he never seemed to fire it without scoping, the Sniper would explain that it was actually a prototype--mail-order special--and that the gun wouldn’t fire unless the special scope was activated. The Spy had made a sarcastic little moue of pity into one hand, which had earned him a shove and good-natured grumble from the Sniper.)

This actually made the Medic’s hand pause. He looked up at the Spy, his eyes slightly unfocused.  
“What was that?”  
“Spy,” the Sniper clarified again, “Is fucking the Scout.”  
The Medic looked at the Sniper, then back at the Spy. “Is this true? Why?”

The Spy sighed and shifted in his chair. When he went to put his elbow down, the Pyro made an alarmed, hurt noise, and he had to lift his elbow: he’d put it down on the edge of their drawing-paper.  
“My apologies,” he said to the Pyro. Then, to the Medic and Sniper, and the still-disbelieving Engineer, he said, “Oui. I fail to see why this is so incredible; you and the Heavy have been a couple for years now, and no one has batted an eye.”  
There was a half-uncomfortable silence at the table. 

The Pyro’s charcoal stick snapped; they sighed, frustrated, and got up to go get more.  
“Well...” the Engineer said at last. “It’s jest...we all had ya pegged for, er. A more cosmopolitan gentleman. And I’ll be the first to vouch, he’s a good kid, but--”

“You are wondering what I could possibly want with the boy.” the Spy said.  
“Well, yeah,” the Engineer said, when the Frenchman made no move to continue the conversation. “Plus, he’s JEST a kid.”

The Spy shrugged.  
“He is adult enough, apparently, to fight and die alongside the rest of us.”  
The Engineer made a noise in his throat, like he was considering saying something but decided against it. 

“He is loud, brash, rude...mein Gott, he talks so much that I wish I had not signed a waiver stipulating I would not remove any vital organs from teammates unless absolutely necessary,” the Medic ticked unattractive features off his fingers, then adjusted his glasses. “I am particularly fascinated with the lung capacity that must be necessary for speaking so many words with one breath.”

“Kid could really use some manners,” the Sniper agreed, scratching one stubbly cheek.  
“Really he is not so bad as all that,” the Spy said, shrugging one shoulder.   
But he wouldn’t say anything else.

That was Wednesday night. 

~

Thursday morning, the Scout, still in the ratty cutoff sweatpants and the even rattier A-shirt he slept in, came ambling into the Engineer’s workshop.

The Engineer was trying to move roughly four hundred pounds of broken machinery, so his appearance was not only unwanted, it was dreaded.  
“Yo, Engie, you got one’a those astrology-map things? For the stars?”  
The Engineer fumbled a piece of broken sentry and swore; he couldn’t bend over to pick it up, and if the Scout did--

“Geez, old man, don’t strain yer old back or nothin’, here, let me help--”  
“Ah, that’s all right now, Scout--”  
It was too late. He’d already picked the piece up. 

“Anyway, like I was sayin’, I need one’a those astrology maps. But not one of the stupid star-sign palm-readin’ hocus-pocus bullshit ones, I need one that has, like, the real stars and stuff on it.” he paused. “Which one’s the hocus-pocus one? Ain’t there two? Astrology and...what’s the other one? Anyway, I know one of ‘em’s bullshit ‘cause my cousin Tim, he goes all the time to this lady, Madame Fortuna or whatever--sounds like a real weird hooker name, right?--and asks her to tell his future an’ shit, and it’s never right. Once he asked which horse to bet on in the Derby, and--” 

“...Scout, could this possibly wait?” the Engineer asked. The cardboard box was splitting down one side, threatening to spill broken machinery everywhere.   
And then he’d want to ‘help’, and the Engineer would never get rid of him.

“What? Naw, I ain’t busy. Like I said, lemme help!” So saying, he took the box--immediately blurting out, “Jesus H. Christ, Engie, what’d ya do, scrap _all_ yer stuff an’ load it into this one box? Where’s this go, anyway?”  
“...over there, by the big metal bin...” the Engineer said, helplessly, and watched the yuong man shuffle over and drop the box.   
It made a series of clanging sounds and a particularly distressing slushing noise.

He was too polite to tell the boy he didn’t have time to listen to him ramble--actually, he had three dispensers to finish calibrating, a malfunctioning level-two sentry, and two teleporter entrances that apparently sent their travelers off into the ether, never to emerge from _any_ teleporter exit. (Thank goodness for Respawn, although no one had been able to tell him where, exactly, they’d wound up.) Moving scrap was the least of his concerns.   
“What was I sayin’, again?”   
The Engineer started to speak. “Well, Scout--”

The Scout snapped his fingers. “Yeah! So, anyway, every time she tells him the wrong horse. _Every time_ , man. So finally he goes and asks her which order the horses will cross the line in. He writes it down on a list, checks their names off the racing form, an’ then he goes down there and bets on the horse she said would cross _last_. Wouldja believe that’s how he won a thousand bucks?” He guffawed at his own anecdote.  
The Engineer actually chuckled a little. 

It occurred to him that maybe that was at least part of the reason the Spy liked the Scout.   
Nothing was ever boring when he was around; that much was certain.  
“So, do you got a map?” the younger man continued.

“Well, I’d have to check. I’m a mite busy right now...” he looked around at his normally-only-mildly-cluttered workshop, which presently looked like the enemy Demoman had gotten in and gone to town. 

“Aw. Well, okay. I’ll remind you later!” the Scout said, and then ambled away.  
The Engineer sighed. He tipped his hardhat forward to scratch at the back of his head, wondering if maybe he should have spoken to the Scout.  
This was before he realized he had nothing he could say that WOULDN’T immediately come off as rude, condescending, and possibly offensively prying.  
“Don’t you know he’s twice your age?” was a meaningless question when his own parents were almost twelve years apart. “Take care of yourelf,” was also pointless; they all got shot and set on fire and exploded and died multiple times a day for a living. “Watch your back,” maybe? But then the Spy had given no hints that he would ever betray anyone on the team. 

The Engineer was left not knowing exactly what to do. 

~

“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” the Heavy bellowed. He was trying to withdraw, but the RED Pyro was dodging back and forth in front of him, staying just out of range. If he turned and ran, the firestarter would just run up behind him and kill him with that gore-crusted rake they ran around with. 

The Demoman’s charred corpse--still crackling with flame--hung from a rocky ledge near him, and there were pieces of the Soldier’s gibbed corpse strewn all over the ground to his right. The RED Sniper had dispatched the Medic with an arrow to the face the moment they’d come around the corner. And the Heavy’s clothes were on fire, leather hissing and cracking and splitting, the cotton of his shirt turning yellow-brown and then black. Every breath brought him the odor of his own burning clothing and flesh. 

The only good thing about dying in a fire was that after the initial blast seared your skin off, most of the pain went with it. So they said. They did not mention the additional effects of multiple bullet and knife wounds.  
This was all a very bad idea, he realized.

He heard rapid footsteps behind him, dread and resignation spiking hard in his gut.  
“Let’s go, let’s go! Let’s--oh, shit, man!”   
“SCOUT!” he barked. 

A second later there was the sound of breaking glass and a hiss as the flames went out.   
He had enough time to turn his head and see the Scout go careening around the corner, whooping at the top of his lungs. Scattergun shots rang out, then the Pyro’s muffled bark of pain, and then silence. 

The Heavy leaned around the corner and saw the Scout dead on the point, his chest and abdomen a gory mangled wreck where the Pyro had gotten him. The rake had skittered off into the tawny dirt beside the Scout.  
The Pyro was dead, as well, mask lenses shattered and head bent at a sad angle. He hefted his gun and walked over to the body, scowling.  
The Medic caught up with him a moment later. 

“Mein Gott, Heffy, you are cooked to a crisp,” he said. He trained the Medigun on him, but then wrinkled his nose and sniffed at him slightly. “And dripping with the Scout’s favorite bottled substance? So, he _did_ run this way.”  
“Da. And nyet,” the Heavy said, chuckling. “I do not think Scout would have thrown Bonk at me. Was milk, instead.”

“He ran past the RED Engineer’s sentry and would not stand still long enough to let me heal him. He could have used the milk to heal himself,” the Medic mused.  
Still, he thought, it was nice enough that the Scout had put him out with the Mad Milk.  
The boy could be selfless, he thought.  
Stupid, but selfless. Perhaps to the Spy this counted as an endearing trait.

 

~

The RED Heavy was plodding towards the point, gun up and grinning. Under its bullets’ onslaught, the BLU Pyro died a sudden, yelping death. The BLU Medic, who had been trailing just after them, retreated with his syringe gun up but didn’t make it around the corner before exploding into gibs--courtesy of a wall-stickytrap the RED Demoman had left.  
The BLU Sniper watched this from his vantage-point, palms sticking to his sweat-stiffened leather gloves. He grunted under his breath. This was not looking good; he’d seen the Demoman die a grisly death, pinned to a wall by the RED Sniper’s arrows; the RED Soldier had made quick work of the Heavy. He knew the Engineer was the only one back at the final point, and now he’d be holding the base alone.  
If he was still alive and hadn’t been shot or stabbed or flambeed to death, and was not yet back out of Respawn.  
But he couldn’t squat in this roost forever; even if he HAD had more than five bullets still on him (which he didn’t) the REDs would be back out and swarming back towards their base in no time. The RED Demoman would see him and lob a few grenades his way; or he’d be particularly unlucky and the RED Pyro would sneak up on him, ignite him, and then chase him around with an axe, laughing while they tried to hack his arms off.  
There was no one left to hold the point, he thought, and he’d have to run and find more ammo soon, and he knew the second he left that spot, the BLUs would retake the point.   
The second he shot the RED Heavy, the Demoman would know EXACTLY where he was; and he knew he was the only person standing between himself and his entire team’s base being blown to smithereens.  
He wondered if he’d have enough time to take out the Heavy and run before the Demoman lobbed three or four grenades into his hiding-spot, or if he should try to find the Demoman first.  
As he was wondering, he saw a flicker of blue go by, and ducked aside to watch as the BLU Scout ran by below the building, almost grim in his silence.   
His shirt was darkened with chevrons of sweat under his arms and down his back; he’d probably run the whole way from Respawn.  
The Sniper frowned. That meant the Engineer’s teleporters were down. Which meant that the Engineer himself was probably dead, as well.

The Scout skidded to a halt, leapt sideways--the Sniper watched him holster his gun and pull his ridiculous metal fan out of his backpack in the next motion, and before the enemy Heavy could switch weapons, he was whaling on him with the flimsy thing, dodging around and just out of his reach.  
While he was whooping and laughing the Sniper lined up the shot--  
“SCREAMIN’ EAGLES!”   
A shadow flitted across his vision a split-second before a rocket impacted on the ground in front of the Heavy, knocking him back.   
The Sniper took the shot.  
The giant RED-clad Russian went down like a bull-sized sack of potatoes.  
The Soldier dropped to the ground a second later, small parachute hanging almost comically from the olive-drab pack on his back. The Scout and the Soldier saluted each other, the Scout with a smug grin, before he thumbed his nose and they strutted towards the RED base together.  
“Hmm,” the Sniper grunted, thoughtfully. Maybe the boy wasn’t as stupid as he acted. He figured the Spy counted that towards something. 

~

“Okay. Okay. Keep yer eyes closed, okay? NO PEEKING, I’M SERIOUS, OR I’LL PUSH YA OFF THE DAMN ROOF!”

“All right, Scout, mon dieu. I will keep my eyes covered.” the Spy said, amused.   
True to his word, he kept his hands over his eyes, standing on the corner of the roof nearest the stairway doors. 

“Okay...okay...NOW!” the Scout said.  
He made a dramatic flourish with his arms as the Spy lowered his hands and turned around.

The Scout had spread a checkered red-and-white picnic blanket on the roof’s low, gentle slope. Balanced rather precariously (and aided with two large-ish pebbles, oh goodness) there was a picnic basket, which contained a bottle of wine and two sandwiches, wrapped in checkered paper that matched the blanket. 

The Spy could only stare for a long moment, his mouth falling slightly open.  
The last time someone had taken the trouble to actually set up a date for HIM, he realized dimly, he was...actually, he had been the Scout’s age. The boy had been a classmate. They’d had a first-rate dinner at a second-rate Italian restaurant, where the other boy had worked as a waiter. Leftovers had never tasted so good.

And now here he was, staring at the (honestly rather charming) tableau: picnic blanket, wine, and the only ceiling overhead the night sky, turning the color of plum. A faint line of gold still traced the distant horizon, itself enlivened by the gentle black swells of the mountains in the distance. The black curtain of night was coming down, and with it, the sheen of stars visible so clearly from out in the desert. There was no moon to interrupt the stars, he realized.

That was probably why the Scout had been pestering everyone about calendars all week, he mused.  
“Ah, shit,” the Scout said, somewhere to his left.  
“Hm?” he said, turning.  
The Scout was rubbing the back of one arm, scuffing his toes against the corrugated roof metal.

“It’s...it’s stupid, I know. Ain’t shit compared to a trip to Europe or a new suit or...” the Scout trailed off. He shrugged, his face tomato-red, his eyes on his own shoes. “Hey, uh, so, you can go back downstairs an’ I’ll pick up the mess, whatever, no big deal--”  
“Scout...” the Spy said, drawing closer to the younger man. “Please, give me a moment to admire a view before condemning it as unworthy of my eyes.”

The Scout blinked at him a few times. “You...you don’t think it’s corny?”   
The Spy ran his hands down the Scout’s arms, gently pressed his hands, threaded their fingers together.   
“I think it is divinely sweet, Scout. Thank you.”   
“Aw,” the Scout said, shooting nervous glances between the Spy’s face and their surroundings. “Uh. Shit. It’s not that big a deal...”

And they sat together under the stars and ate dinner. The Scout had forgotten glasses for the wine, so after popping off the cork and laughing sheepishly, he and the Spy ended up passing the bottle back and forth. 

“You know the constellations?” the Spy asked, genuinely impressed.  
The Scout flushed again and started to stammer, “Well--yeah, I mean I...” but he cracked in the middle of it, laughing nervously. 

“Uh, naw. You don’t see too many stars in Boston. ‘Least, not the part i’m from. Lots’a streetlamps, though! And, oh man, around the holidays, they put these wreaths and red ribbons and stuff on the lampposts, so it’s real nice lookin’, with all the snow on the ground and all the store windows all lit up. At nighttime it looks kinda like one of those fancy postcards, you know, the kind with the gold letters.”

The Spy chuckled into the mouth of the bottle, before tipping it back and swallowing a gulp of wine.  
“And this,” he said. “This is a surprise, as well.”  
The Scout looked panicked for a second. “Is it not good? Oh my god, I am SO sorry, I didn’t even--”  
The Spy laughed outright. “Stop worrying, Scout! You have already impressed me. I was going to say, it is very good.”

“...Oh. I, uh, can’t take credit for that, either. I kinda asked Demo what kind’a wine he’d bring for a date. He got all misty-eyed and gave me this stuff. Then he patted me on the back and told me not to sacrifice my relationship for my job,” the Scout said, his forehead creased.

The Spy looked at him musingly, the bottle pressed lightly against his bottom lip. He settled his hand on top of the Scout’s, his thumb rubbing the younger man’s knuckles through the ever-present tape.   
“Wise advice,” he murmured.


	14. Sneaking Around the Scouts

The BLU Scout first started to think something was up when he saw the Engineer acting funny.  
It was after a battle one day, and he was heading back to help the older man break down his nest--which, of course, amounted to walking with him, talking amiably while the older man carried around his machinery, all packed neat into their toolboxes.   
But when he rounded the corner to where the Engineer's stuff was set up, he saw the Texan lounging against a dispenser, one arm braced along its top.   
This was not unusual. 

What WAS unusual was the presence of a certain stuck-up Frenchman, also leaned over the dispenser. He was smoking a cigarette, his legs crossed one ankle over his other shin, with the pointed toe of one expensive shoe digging just slightly into the reddish-orange dirt. 

His free arm was laid along the top of the dispenser, right alongside the Engineer's, from elbow to wrist, and the Scout saw him brush his gloved fingertips over the knuckles of the Engineer's flesh-and-bone hand.

The Spy exhaled smoke, tilting his head slightly to the side so the stream went away from the Engineer's face. He was smiling, a little crooked, and the Scout heard him say, softly, "It is very smooth, no?"  
The Engineer chuckled a little, and nodded. He didn’t fan away the stray wisps of smoke that did reach him.  
Then the Spy went to hand the cigarette to the Engineer, and the smell of reefer hit the Scout in the face like a damp towel.  
His hackles went up immediately and he didn’t even rightly know why.

(Later, he would sit in his room and think really hard, before realizing that THEIR Spy didn’t smoke pot--only those fancy brown cigarettes that smelled like the things you stuck in Christmas hams.)

The Spy, still smiling, was leaning towards the Engineer, who wasn't moving away, who was still just standing there with his arm all mashed up against the Spy's, with the Spy playing with his fingers like he was going to grab his hand any second.  
The Scout stepped onto the concrete, and the sound of his footfall on the thin layer of scattered sand made both the Engineer and Spy freeze.  
They looked up at him, the shock registering on both their faces.

He caught the way they glanced back at each other and stared at each other for a whole second before the Engineer snatched his shotgun from where it was leaned against the wall and blew the Spy's brains out all over the tawny-red dirt.  
The older man straightened his overalls, huffed a little, and muttered, "Damned Spies. Never can be sure which is which."  
And they both stared at the headless, red-suited body lying in the sand before it faded to nothingness, snatched up by Respawn. 

The Scout started to ask when, exactly, he was got cozy with THEIR Spy, but thought the better of it. Instead of running his mouth, for once, he just let the thought run around inside his head.

~a short while later~

“You all right there, Red?” the Engineer murmured, without turning his head.  
The air in the corner to his right replied, just as quietly, “I have survived worse, you must know.” The voice sounded amused.  
“I know. I jest--well, I didn’t figure he’d sneak up on us.”  
“It is nothing. Though, I do not suppose our superiors would necessarily approve of the Dead Ringer being put to such a use...”

The Engineer chuckled a little, at that. “Well, I suppose we’ll just have to make sure they never find out.”  
The corner seemed to consider for a moment before replying, “Not a very difficult challenge. Although, I do expect you to make it up to me...”

Someone lifted off his helmet; he felt a brush of cloth against his shoulder, lips against his cheek. He laughed a little when a hand slid into the collar of his shirt, and another brushed off one of his overall straps. The same invisible hands shucked the overalls’ bib down in slow, deliberate movements, and the RED Spy probably would have managed to get his shirt off, too, if they hadn’t been interrupted again.  
But a moment later the Pyro came in, growling, and shooed the Spy away with two well-placed airblasts.   
“All right, all right! I am going, I am going, calm down,” the Spy said. 

He uncloaked long enough to touch the Engineer’s cheek, gently, then his shoulder, before cloaking again. This time, however, he let his footfalls sound as he walked away.   
Once the Spy had gone and the Pyro had gone around the corners of the barn waving a wet mop, for good measure, they propped the mop in the corner, walked smack into the middle of the Engineer’s workspace, and proceeded to sit down, cross-legged, on the beaten-up square of carpet he had under his main worktable. 

They looked up at him, black lenses blank but posture clearly expectant.  
He chuckled a little.   
“S’pose you’ll be wantin’ a tall tale?”  
The Pyro hummed an affirmative answer; the Engineer, smiling, scratched his head and said, “Well, I’m sure I could think up somethin’.”

~

The Scout tried to take it up with the only other person he knew who hated the RED Spy as much as--well, as much as they were all supposed to.   
He’d been sitting in the waiting room, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, aggressively jogging his foot to keep himself at least SOMEWHAT calm. 

The Demoman looked up at the newspaper he was reading one-handed, and gave the Scout a flat, unimpressed stare. He had narrowly escaped a run-in with the RED Sniper that left him with an arrow jutting out of one shoulder.  
“I got set on fire,” the Scout muttered, shifting in the chair. 

(This was true. But really he was only slightly singed; he’d felt worse when one of his brothers had tricked him into getting too close to the fireplace at his grandma’s place, after telling him he could see Santa’s boots if he looked up the chimney.)

The Demoman only sighed and went back to his nwespaper.

A moment later the Medic opened the door and ushered out the Soldier, who was limping. His left foot was swaddled in a fresh cast that he’d pulled his sock over. The sock had a hole in the toe and bulged comically around the cast. It didn’t go all the way up his ankle.  
The Scout couldn’t decide whether to laugh or ask if the older man was all right. He settled on not saying anything.   
From inside the infirmary, the Medic yelled, “Take the crutches, you stubborn idiot! I will not set that ankle a second time!”

The Soldier froze where he was, grumbled a bit, and then limped back through the doors. He came back out on the crutches, face puckered up like he’d bitten into a lemon.  
The Scout DID laugh, then--an ungainly snort.  
The Soldier swung around and shook his fist at him, sending the crutch that had been under that arm clattering to the ground.  
The Scout laughed outright.

The Demoman sighed, slapped the newspaper down onto his lap, and said, “Ach, boy, don’t be such a little--”  
“SHOW SOME RESPECT FOR INJURED SENIOR OFFICERS, PRIVATE!” the Soldier barked.

The Scout bit his lip and tried to sober up, but the sight of the Soldier trying to fish the crutch up from the floor--gingerly using the toes of his injured foot, while he tried to balance only on his other one--was enough that he cracked up again.  
The Medic pushed the infirmary doors open wider and sighed loudly.

“What, Scout, what is wrong with you? Hm? Herr Demoman, please, I can see you now,” the Medic said, and held the door for the Scottish man to pass through. The poor guy couldn’t extend his arm properly--that arrow was in there pretty good.  
“But Doc, wait, I got--it’s real important! It has to do with the whole team!” the Scout protested.

The Medic sighed again and this time punctuated it with an eyeroll so expressive the Scout actually felt embarrassed.  
“As important as the incident with the wooden cows? Or the Spy snowman? Or the giant beach-ball?”   
The Scout bristled at the mockery. “Hey! That ain’t fair, those was just jokes, I’m bein’ serious now, Medic, you gotta listen--”  
“No, what I have GOT to do is remove this arrow before the Demoman’s wound becomes infected. Goodness only knows what kind of unhygienic conditions the enemy Sniper keeps his arrows in...” so saying, the older man bustled his patient into the infirmary, the doors swinging shut behidn him.

The Scout stood there in the waiting room, his shoulders raised and his mouth slightly open, searching for something to say.  
He didn’t even hear the Soldier swing the crutch at the back of his knees, so he didn’t have time to dodge or jump before his legs were swept from under him.

“Augh! What the HELL, Soldier!”  
“Consider this a MILD FORM of CORPORAL PUNISHMENT for MOCKING YOUR SUPERIORS!” the Soldier barked.   
He sat there on teh floor a minute, listening to the sound of the older man stumping away on his crutches. The back of his head hurt now, bad enough to make his eyes water, and his ribs, too, to say nothing of his calves.

But he knew the Medic wouldn’t even spare him a jolt of the Medigun, not now. He rolled over, groaning miserably, and limped off to the kitchen to get himself a bag of ice.

~

Later, as he laid there in his narrow bed, ankles propped on the metal bed frame and head pillowed on the bag of ice, he kept turning over the events he’d seen. 

It sure hadn’t looked like the RED Spy was trying to stab the Engineer, that much he was certain of. And if the RED Spy had been trying to impersonate the BLU Spy, then he had a lot of learning to do. The Scout knew he wasn’t the sharpest tack, and wasn’t the best at ‘reading’ people, but even HE could see that the BLU Spy--his own team’s spy--was soft on the BLU Sniper, not Engie. Wouldn’t someone who was a supposed master of disguise and impersonation be able to get a detail as big as that right?

The next day he kept his eyes peeled, but the RED Spy didn’t show.  
The RED Pyro DID, however, along with the RED Demoman, blasting everything the Engineer built to pieces. 

He’d just managed to kill the RED Pyro and was running around wiht his shirt literally still on fire. He’d used his last bottle of Mad Milk to douse the Engineer, and now caught himself regretting his earlier act of altruism.  
He jogged back down the stairs, flinching and biting back pained screams, and flung himself into the greenish--but blessedly cool--waters of the little ravine.  
His flaming clothes went out with a hiss. 

For a long while he stayed there, stretched out in the water, just catching his breath and enjoying the cool sensation of the water on his burnt skin. He knew he’d have nasty burn-blisters all over his back and arms and shoulders later, if he didn’t die and get sent through Respawn before the match ended. 

Then he heard the footsteps--dull thudding noise of heavy boots over the concrete.  
He tensed up immediately, checked the clip on his scattergun and found he only had four bullets left. 

He cursed himself inwardly, wishing he’d taken a pistol instead of the Milk as his secondary, and wondered if he could distract whoever it was and run in the opposite direction faster than they could shoot him.   
He heard the soft pop-and-clack of a Demoman--the enemy Demoman, almost certainly--reloading his grenade launcher, then silence.

A droplet of water ran down his nose and fell onto his arm, leaving an itching trail in its wake. He didn’t move. He held his gun at the ready and crouched close to the cement wall where at least, he figured, he’d have some leverage to push off and run away before the guy started raining explosives down on him.  
The thought wasn’t even finished running around inside his head when he heard the Demoman’s voice.

“I know you’re in there, ye lily-livered coward! Ge’ out here an’ let’s settle this man-tae-man!”  
The Scout started to sweat, his armpits and his spine and the back of his neck prickling in nervousness.  
Who the fuck was he talking to? There was no way he’d seen him! He’d have blown him up already!  
The rasping sound of one of the automatic rolling doors opening, and another distinctive, heavy footstep--thank god, he thought, Soldier! 

He expected the sound of one or two rockets and a bitten-off curse as the Demoman flew apart into gibs, but instead heard a low chuckle and some buckles clinking.   
Soldier said, “WELL! You skirt-twirling Scottish TRAITOR, I didn’t think you understood the concept of HONOR OR PUNCTUALITY anymore!”  
The Scout heard the ‘poomp’ sound of a stickybomb being fired.  
“IT’S A KILT! An’ you’d best watch your mouth! If I thought ye could handle it, I’d ha’e brought my sword!”  
“ME?! UNABLE to handle a GLORIFIED BUTTER-KNIFE?!”  
“BETTER A KNIFE THAN A JUMPED-UP GARDEN TROWEL!”  
The Scout blinked, confused, but he KNEW he didn’t mis-hear when the Soldier mumbled, very quietly, “Let’s not go to the same place as last time.”  
The Demoman made a quiet noise of assent, and then, in his normal earsplitting voice, continued, “SAME TIME, SAME PLACE! YOU’VE INSULTED ME FOR THE LAST TIME! WE SETTLE THIS ONCE AND FOR ALL!”

There was a sudden scramble of footsteps, followed by a pair of explosions that sent concrete dust flying into the water and left the Scout covering his head. His ears were ringing.

After a long moment he leaned out and peeped over the edge, half-expecting to see dropped weapons and gibs, but finding nothing. Instead he was left wondering where the hell the two of them had just blast-jumped off to. 

That night, when things in the base settled down and he 

“Hey, Engie?” he asked, knocking on the doorframe.  
“Oh, Scout! Well hello there! Didn’t expect you tonight,” the Engineer said.  
This appeared true; his workbench was currently covered in swaths of blue paper and stacks of printed forms. Some fo them had been knocked over and accordioned down to the floor, which was also strewn with the wreckage of no fewer than three ruined teleporters.  
“Uh. Burnin’ the midnight oil, Engie?” he asked.

“Yes, indeed! Testin’ out a wrench prototype.” He held it up for the Scout to see.  
It was blue and silver and had a little antenna coming off the top.  
“What’s the wire for?”

“That’s the thing!” he grinned. “With this, I won’t have ta scramble to get back ta our base, if I need to! All I do is hold this here beauty up--provided it’s got a charge, mind--and I can teleport myself right back!”  
“So the wrench is like a portable, hand-held teleporter?” the Scout asked.  
“Exactly!”

“Oh,” the Scout said, a smile spreading across his face. He didn’t understand the science, but he’d sure as hell let the Engineer know he thought it was neat, anyway. “Hey, yeah, no, that’s actually pretty cool, Engie. Save ya from havin’ to run around scroungin’ for metal if you’re real far from a dispenser, too, huh?”  
“It sure will! Wait’ll I get a chance to test it on the field!” the Engineer said. He set his newest creation down on teh tabletop, on top of a square of black felt. 

The Scout carefully picked his way through all the exploded teleporter parts until he reached the stool he normally sat on--currently pushed all the way into a back corner by one of the bookshelves they’d built.   
“So, didja need somethin’ important, or did ya just come to shoot the breeze?” the Engineer asked. He was clapping metal filings off his organic hand, the fingers of the robotic one clicking softly with the movement.

The Scout tried to think of how, exactly, he should say what he wanted to say, and couldn’t come up with a way to start his sentence. ‘So hey, I think the RED Demoman tricked Solly into following him out-of-bounds the other day to do...SOMETHING? And the RED Spy’s been actin’ real funny lately, don’t you think? Like that thing the other day, what the hell was THAT about?’ --well, asking that way probably wouldn’t fly.   
He decided he needed--as Spy would say--some tact.  
Finally he said, “Oh, well, y’know--nothin’ big. Just--” he stalled. Just what? 

But he was lucky; the Engineer was all wrapped up in thoughts about his new wrench. He was currently writting something in a notebook that had been pushed to one corner of the desk. The paper printouts seemed to be erupting from a wooden print-copy box on the worktable’s corner. Ever now and then the Engineer would turn, read something off the long printout, and circle something before going back to writing in his notebook.

Watching him work when he was excited actually calmed the Scout down; he worked methodically, at a fast enough pace that watching him didn’t make the Scout feel like he was in line at the unemployment office.   
For awhile he was content just to sit there and listen to the Engineer work, alternating between writing and reading, but he still couldn’t think of anything to say.   
He shifted slightly and teh stool creaked.  
The Engineer looked up from his notebook and over at him.

“Scout? Why--boy, are you jest sittin’ there starin’ off into space? I thought you’d gone and gotten yourself a book.” the Engineer said.  
“Oh! Uh...naw. I was...I was thinkin’...” the Scout said.   
He honestly couldn’t think of any way to say what he wanted to say, so he settled for picking at his knuckle tape instead.   
When he was silent for a beat, the Engineer put the wrench down and swiveled around in his chair.  
“Now, Scout, whatever’s wrong, if you want, you can let me know.”

~

The Scout kept crawling until he heard it--a low crackle through the bushes, the soft twang of a guitar.  
A man’s voice, nasal and French, the words lost before he could catch them.   
“Whoa, now, hold on. Be careful or I might just take you up on that,” the Engineer’s voice, playful.  
Then, the Spy’s voice.

The RED Spy’s voice.   
“...should. He likes it.”  
A soft, snorting chuckle he’d recognize anywhere as their own Spy’s laugh.   
The Scout’s face unintentionally screwed up in thought. BOTH Spies?! That wrecked his theory that it was the RED Spy tricking Engie, in a big way; after all, he knew THEIR Spy--the BLU Spy--was a prickly jerk sometimes but a big softie underneath all those expensive layers of clothing, and he’d certainly have defended the Engineer from the other Spy, if he was trying anything.  
Wouldn’t he?

But then, he thought, his mind racing, what if the RED Spy--who really was a crafty bastard--had both of them over the barrel with some kind of terrible blackmail info, and he was threatening them both? What if he was trying to wheedle their intel out of the Spy, and was using the Engineer as bait?  
His gut twisted into sick knots.  
He really, REALLY didn’t think his contract covered things like this.

Then whoever was fooling around with the guitar actually started strumming, but a fourth voice--one he almost didn’t recognize--started talking.  
“Y’all shoulda oughta bought some stuff with ya, if you’re already makin’ plans like this.”  
The RED Engineer?   
He was chewing his lip so hard it hurt now. What the hell was going on? Stuff? For WHAT?

~

The RED Scout first noticed something was up when guys on his team started walking around cheese-kneed at odd hours of the day.  
He figured they had figured a secret way of meeting and hooking up with chicks from teh local town, and he wanted in on any possible schemes that were going on. If old geezers were getting laid, he wanted to get some, too.

His latest surprise was the Sniper, who he saw come creeping into one of the side doors, easing it shut so the old boards didn't give him away with their usual grinding noise.  
The Scout almost wasn't fast enough. He'd been sitting in his room, his feet up on his desk and a baseball magazine open over his lap, but sitting there fantasizing about new catching mitts or fine-grain wooden bats or the new super-light irradiated carbon-alloy bats that were available (only though Mann Co., of course) was boring compared to the possibility of getting laid.

The Sniper had made it almost all the way down the hall when the Scout swung his feet off his desk and crossed his room in two bounds, lunged into the hall, and pinned the Sniper where he was with a look.  
The Sniper shifted slightly, then sighed.  
"Haven't got any on me, mate," he said.

The Scout made a face, confused, then shook his head. "Fuck the pot, man, you know I don’t smoke that shit anyway! You--you just got laid!"  
The Sniper gave him a completely flat look, before saying, in an equally flat voice, "What."  
"Yeah! Yeah, you did! LOOK at you!"

The Sniper glanced down at himself--his normal outfit, brown denim pants and red shirt not so much as rumpled.  
"Not too likely. Ain't any worthwhile sheilas in a hundred mile radius, anyway," the older man said.  
"No no no, come ON man, you gotta tell me! Really, who was it? D'ya have do sneak her in? She still here? Does she got a sister? A friend?"  
At that, the Sniper snorted, shaking his head. "Get yerself a hobby, kid, the loneliness is gettin' to ya."   
And he walked away.

He walked away, with the exact same feigned-casual gait his brothers used when they'd just finished a really choice lay and they were still slightly sore from how good it was.  
The Scout stood there, feeling stupid and confused and hurt. He'd thought the Sniper was cool.


End file.
